Why Pakistan Needs a Graduated Legal-Criminal Justice Response to Digital Radicalisation: Importance, Necessity, and Applications of the AYAZ KHAN Model

Abstract

Digital radicalisation has transformed the legal and institutional landscape of counter-extremism in Pakistan. Online extremist ecosystems now operate through social media, encrypted messaging, video-sharing platforms, and increasingly fragmented digital environments that blur the boundary between protected expression, extremist advocacy, facilitation, and terrorism-linked conduct. Drawing on a wider socio-legal doctoral study, this article explains the importance, necessity, and applied value of the AYAZ KHAN Model, a structured legal-criminal justice framework developed to address digital radicalisation in Pakistan. The article argues that existing law remains fragmented across the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 and its later amendments, regulatory practice, and institutional routines. That fragmentation produces conceptual instability, threshold ambiguity, evidentiary fragility, institutional overlap, and procedural vulnerability. In response, the AYAZ KHAN Model proposes eight integrated components: assessment of risk, yardsticks of legal threshold, authentication and attribution of digital evidence, zoned intervention and response, knowledge-led institutional coordination, human rights and procedural justice safeguards, accountability and appellate review, and neutralization, rehabilitation, and normative reintegration. The article demonstrates why this model is needed, how it improves on both the current Pakistani framework and selected comparative approaches, and where it can be applied across prevention, investigation, prosecution, adjudication, rehabilitation, and policy coordination.  It concludes that Pakistan requires not a more punitive but a more coherent, reviewable, and evidence-based response to digital radicalisation.

Keywords: Digital Radicalisation, Pakistan, Criminal Justice, Preventive Justice, Digital Evidence, Terrorism Law