LAHORE: A constitutional petition has been filed at the Lahore Registry of the Federal Constitutional Court seeking a ban on social media access for children under the age of 16, along with legislation to verify users’ ages.
The petition was filed by Advocate Supreme Court Sheraz Zaka and others under Article 175E of the Constitution. It argues that children require protection from the economic and moral harms of social media and from objectionable content.
The petitioners have sought a prohibition on social media access for children below 16, and have prayed that a law be framed to establish age verification as the means of determining a user’s age.
Age verification is the technical and legal pivot of every jurisdiction that has attempted this restriction. Without a verification mechanism, a minimum-age rule is unenforceable, since platforms rely on self-declared dates of birth that a child can trivially falsify.
The petition also seeks directions to the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority to impose a complete ban on objectionable content and the depiction of alcohol in dramas and advertisements.
That request extends the petition beyond social media into broadcast regulation, an area where PEMRA already exercises content authority under its own ordinance and code of conduct.
The petitioners have asked that laws be framed on the pattern of Australia, Italy and Brazil to protect the mental and moral development of children. Australia’s minimum-age legislation for social media, passed in 2024, remains the most-cited model internationally and has been closely watched by regulators in several jurisdictions as an early test of whether such a restriction can be enforced at platform level.
The petition further submits that 25 million children in Pakistan are out of school, and asks that the provision of education and the protection of constitutional rights be ensured.
That figure has long been the central statistic in litigation and policy debate on Article 25-A, the constitutional provision guaranteeing free and compulsory education to children aged five to sixteen. Its inclusion frames the social media question within a wider argument about the state’s obligations towards minors.
The federal government, the Ministry of Information Technology, PEMRA and the National Cyber Crime Agency have been made respondents in the petition.
The Federal Constitutional Court, before which the matter has been filed, exercises jurisdiction under Article 175E of the Constitution. No date for a first hearing had been announced at the time of filing.
Any age-verification regime raises a second-order problem that the petition does not resolve: verification requires the collection of identity data from every user, including adults, which creates a privacy exposure of its own. That trade-off — child safety against mass identity collection — has been the principal point of contention wherever such laws have been introduced.
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