When the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Zahir Jaffer earlier this year, the country breathed a collective sigh of relief. After the gruesome murder of 27-year-old Noor Mukadam in July 2021, a case that sent shockwaves across the nation, there finally seemed to be closure. The Court’s decision confirmed that the legal process can still deliver justice, even when the accused comes from privilege. Yet even this hard-won verdict could not escape the misogyny that continues to shadow our justice system.
In an additional note appended to the judgment, one member of the bench, Justice Ali Baqar Najafi, opted not to judge the crime but to judge the victim–framing the murder as the “direct result” of a “vice spreading in upper society,” namely what he described as a “live-in relationship.” It was an unwarranted moral lecture in a murder case, and it struck at the heart of what justice must mean: that victims are not on trial; their killers are.
The contrast could not be starker. On one hand, forensic science (CCTV footage, DNA, physical evidence) affirmed the brutality of the crime and tied Jaffer conclusively to it. The legal architecture held. On the other, part of the same judiciary indulged personal prejudice, casting the victim’s social choices as relevant to her fate. The optics are grim.
The backlash was immediate and justified. Journalists, lawyers and rights advocates took to social media to insist that women deserve justice, not judgment. Others pointed out an obvious truth: most violence against women in Pakistan occurs within “legally valid” marriages. The judge’s note therefore, reflects a deeply rooted mindset; one that treats women as morally suspect before they are even recognised as victims. That these remarks surfaced on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women only sharpened their cruelty.
In one stroke, this case became more than a murder trial. Pakistan can produce strong legal judgments (as it did here) yet still fall back on patriarchal reflexes that make women responsible for the violence inflicted on them. Noor’s murder, like Sarah Inam’s and countless unnamed cases, has become a mirror held up to our institutions.
Noor cannot be brought back. But her case leaves us with a stark question: will Pakistan allow even its highest courts to turn women’s deaths into morality tales? *