Islamabad High Court Demands Answers on Under-16 Social Media Access

Pakistan doesn’t have a law that tells Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram how old a user needs to be. Under-16 social media access is now before the Islamabad High Court, after Chief Justice Sarfraz Dogar issued notices to ten federal ministries and regulatory bodies on Monday, asking them to explain how the state plans to shield children under 16 from what’s happening on their phones.

The petition was filed under Article 199 of the Constitution by citizen Waqas Nasir through lawyers Muhammad Jalal Haider and Yahya Farid Khwaja. Its central demand is narrow but consequential: an effective age-verification mechanism for social media accounts, paired with legislation that doesn’t currently exist in Pakistan.

Who has to answer, and why does it matter?

The list of respondents reflects how scattered the responsibility for this issue actually is. The IHC sent notices to the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Law and Justice, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, and the Ministry of Human Rights. Alongside them, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, PEMRA, the National Commission on the Rights of Child, and the National Commission for Human Rights were also named.

Ten bodies, no single owner. That is arguably the petition’s underlying complaint, even though it is framed around age verification specifically.

One exchange during the hearing made the gap explicit. Justice Dogar asked the petitioner’s counsel whether PEMRA had any law dealing with the issue. Haider said the authority could act on complaints under its existing powers but confirmed there was no specific legislation regulating social media use by children under 16.

What the petition says is going wrong

The filing lists a familiar set of digital-age harms, tied specifically to unsupervised use by minors: cyberbullying, online harassment, grooming, exploitation, exposure to violent or sexually explicit material, misinformation, addictive design patterns, privacy violations, and financial scams. It also references scientific and government research linking heavy social media use among minors to anxiety, depression, self-harm risk, and disrupted cognitive and emotional development.

That research is not named in what has been made public so far, so those links should be treated as the petition’s framing rather than settled findings until the underlying studies surface in court filings.

The Australia and France comparison

Advocate Haider cited two countries that have already legislated on this. Australia has restricted social media access for users under 16; France has done the same for under-15s. The point he made to the court was that if two different regulatory systems can draw an age line, Pakistan’s absence of one reflects a policy choice that hasn’t been made yet, not a technical limitation.

The comparison carries weight, but it also elides real differences. Australia’s under-16 restriction involves platform-level enforcement obligations that took months of regulatory design and industry negotiation to settle. Pakistan would be starting from a legal framework that, by PEMRA’s own account in court, does not yet have a category for children’s social media use at all.

Where this actually leaves Pakistan

The IHC has not ruled on anything yet. It has asked ten bodies to appear at the next hearing with answers and directed the court’s law officer to ensure the notices are acted on rather than left unanswered, a step that suggests some concern about regulatory notices going unheeded.

What happens next depends on what PTA and PEMRA say they are capable of enforcing. Age verification is a simple demand to state in a petition. In practice, it requires deciding between ID-linked verification, parental consent systems, platform-side self-declaration, or some combination, and none of these currently has a legal basis in Pakistan. The ministries named in this case are not only responding to a lawsuit. They are being asked, for the first time in a Pakistani court, to say who is actually responsible for handling this.