Daily Times

In a decision that has reignited fierce debate over the country’s tolerance for gender-based violence, the Peshawar High Court (PHC) last week released a man convicted of murdering his wife after her family accepted a pardon under Pakistan’s controversial Islamic restitution laws. To add to the tragedy, the ruling cannot be overlooked as an anomaly but a symptom of a system where justice for women hinges on the whims of families-often those complicit in their oppression.

Pakistan’s Qisas (retributive justice) and Diyat (blood money) laws, rooted in Islamic jurisprudence, treat murder as a private dispute rather than a state crime. While intended to offer reconciliation, these laws disproportionately fail women in cases of domestic violence and so-called “honour killings,” where perpetrators are frequently relatives and pardons are brokered by families upholding the same patriarchal norms that condone the violence.

In 2016, Pakistan passed the Anti-Honor Killing Law, mandating life imprisonment even if families pardon the killer. But activists say loopholes persist. Courts often downgrade charges to “ordinary murder,” which remains pardonable, or accept pardons to commute sentences.

The numbers paint a grim picture: Over 500 women are killed annually for the pettiest of excuses just because their male relatives find it convenient to preserve “honour,” per the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Interestingly, convictions remain rare, even in cases that find their way to courtrooms. That, in an increasingly large number, men of justice have long weaponized appeals to “cultural norms” to shield perpetrators of gender-based violence cannot be denied as people on both sides of the bench (willingly or unwillingly) play their part in reframing systemic misogyny as tradition.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, these pages will (for the millionth time) urge those standing at the wheel that addressing this grave miscarriage of justice requires an end to all legal loopholes. Reforms should compel the state to act as the primary plaintiff in all gender-based violence trials while holding judges accountable. Until then, the law remains little more than ink on paper. As Saeeda Bibi’s husband strolls out of court, her story joins a harrowing archive of Pakistani women whose lives were traded like currency-not by rogue actors, but by the institution sworn to defend them. *