Daily Times

The cold blooded murder of a married and three-month pregnant woman, Farzana Parveen, 25, outside the Lahore High Court (LHC) by her parents and relatives on Tuesday made headlines in the national as well as the international newspapers, and the electronic media. This shameful and inhuman act drew severe criticism of the weak laws for protecting women in Pakistan. She was killed in front of the policemen standing on duty at the premises of the highest provincial court. Her crime was that she had married against the will of her parents a widower, Muhammad Iqbal, 45, despite his being twice her age. Shockingly, Muhammad Iqbal had strangled his first wife to death six years back and admitted doing so in order to marry Farzana Parveen. Iqbal spent some years in prison for murdering his first wife, but he was released, as so many similar criminals are usually released after being pardoned by the family of the deceased. In both cases, the victims were women. There is no dearth of women’s protection laws and all of them lay out severe punishments. However, the implementation of these laws is found nowhere.

After the murders of women, virtually out-of-court settlements are sought through jirgas. In the majority of cases, the jirgas are headed by sitting lawmakers and the politicised police never dare to prevent these illegal jirgas. In the jirgas, the women of one party are forcibly handed over to marry the males of the ‘victimised’ party to settle whatever scores exist. What kind of wild justice is this that only women suffer and are made scapegoats in all cases? The ‘pardon’ by the ‘victim’ families and the unchecked jirgas are the triggering factors behind the incidents of Karo-Kari (retribution for dishonour). There is a long list of jirgas that have handed down similar illegal decisions. For example in March 2014 a jirga was held in Wazirabad town of Sindh’s Shikarpur district that passed a decision in a Karo-Kari case. The jirga was headed by a federal parliamentarian from a Sindhi political party. In March 2012, the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (SC) Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry took suo motu notice of a jirga that ordered the rape of a woman in Sheikhupura. The jirga permitted giving women to settle the dispute. The then Chief Justice categorically termed holding of jirgas against the Constitution. In 2010, in Bhambal village, Sindh, a jirga ordered the marriage of two minor girls to men in a clan to settle a Karo-Kari dispute.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said that she was deeply shocked by the case of Farzana Parveen and said she did not even wish to use the phrase ‘honour killing’ to describe it since there was not the faintest vestige of honour in killing a woman in this way. She further remarked that she was killed on her way to court and it shows a serious failure by the state to provide security for someone who — given how common such killings are in Pakistan — was obviously at risk. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in a report last month that some 869 women were murdered in honour killings in 2013. In 2012, the number of women murdered in Karo-Kari was half of that. Women have representation in the national and provincial assembles. They have 17 percent of the seats in the Senate. They have ten percent of seats in the highest civilian bureaucracy exam, the Civil Superior Services (CSS). They have job quotas in almost every provincial or federal government department. But these educated women, despite enjoying all these powers, have failed to protect their fellow women badly suffering in a male dominated and conservative society. The terrorists have destroyed hundreds of girls’ schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) to deprive females of their basic right of education.

There are a great numbers of bills to protect women, but none of these bills has so far been implemented in a woman’s case. The bills that exist are: the Protection of Women at Work Place Bill 2009, the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill, and the Acid Control and Acid Prevention Bill. These bills perhaps look beautiful on the statute books but they are not applied anywhere. Somehow, all these bills were enacted during the last Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government after long efforts by the concerned lawmakers. A huge reduction could be made in violence against women and Karo-Kari incidents if a special task force is constituted to look into anti-women practices and act according to the laws laid down in favour of women. Moreover, the message that can be taken from the murder of Farzana Parveen is that one cannot save her life from the tyranny of the powerful even by approaching the highest provincial court. It has been made very clear now that there is no law to protect a person who seeks justice. The rule of ‘might is right’ dominates the country. How can witnesses dare to appear before a court to testify against a criminal or a powerful man when there is no protection mechanism? The murder of a young woman outside the highest provincial court challenges the enacted women protection laws and threatens people who become witnesses against a criminal or an influential person before a court. A state that so unequivocally abdicates its monopoly on violence becomes moribund. The time to wake up is now.

The writer is a blogger and freelance columnist