ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) is taking up a petition seeking legislation on the use of social media by children under the age of 16, in a case that could shape how Pakistan regulates minors’ access to online platforms.
Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court Justice Sarfraz Dogar will hear the petition, filed by citizen Waqas Nasir.
The petition has been filed through advocates Muhammad Jalal Haider and Yahya Farid Khawaja, and requests the framing of an effective age-verification system for social media accounts belonging to children under 16.
The petition asks the court to direct the formation of a comprehensive legal and regulatory framework to protect children from the harmful effects of social media, cyberbullying, online harassment and damaging content.
It also seeks the imposition of specific responsibilities on social media platforms for the protection of children, and the creation of an effective system covering age verification, parental controls and protection from harmful material.
The petition presents legislation and proposed measures on children’s use of social media in Australia, France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Spain as comparative examples.
It cites Australia’s ban on social media use by children under 16, France’s requirement of parental consent for children under 15, and measures for children’s online protection under the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act 2023.
The petitioner argues that various countries are introducing age limits and safeguards for children’s digital protection and that effective legislation is also needed in Pakistan. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and its General Comment No. 25 have been invoked as a legal basis.
The Ministry of Information Technology, the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Law, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority have been made respondents.
The petition further seeks directions to the federal government to enact appropriate legislation regulating social media use by children under 16, and to establish a dedicated social media protection and regulatory mechanism.
The comparative examples cited in the petition are real, but they are not yet success stories, and it would be misleading to present them as settled models.
Australia’s under-16 restriction is the most far-reaching measure of its kind and places the compliance burden on platforms rather than parents or children. Its central difficulty is verification. Establishing that a user is over 16 without collecting identity documents from every user — including adults — has proved technically hard. The available options are document upload, facial age estimation, or third-party verification services, and each carries its own privacy cost. A child-protection law that requires the entire adult population to submit identity data to social media companies creates a new category of risk while addressing an old one.
That trade-off is sharper in Pakistan than in Australia or the UK, for two reasons. First, Pakistan has no enacted personal data protection law; a draft has been circulating for years without passage. Introducing mandatory age verification before a data protection framework exists means large volumes of identity data would be collected under no statutory safeguard.
Second, enforcement reach. Pakistan’s regulators have limited leverage over foreign-domiciled platforms, and the primary tool historically used — blocking — is blunt, easily circumvented by VPN, and carries costs for lawful users and the freelance economy.
The meaningful question at this stage is whether the court treats this as a matter for judicial direction or refers it to Parliament. Legislation of this kind involves competing rights — child safety, privacy, expression, and access to information — and is properly the work of a legislature that can take evidence. A judicial direction to “frame a law” without specifying its architecture typically produces a rushed statutory instrument.
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