Daily Times

Asma Jahangir spent her career defending rights of women, religious minorities and children in Pakistan.

She was a staunch critic of the Hudood Ordinance and blasphemy laws that were put in place as part of General Ziaul Haq’s Islamisation. She was a founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and served as Secretary-General and later, chairperson of the organisation.

Notably, in 1980, Jahangir and her sister, Hina Jilani got together with fellow activists and lawyers to form the first law firm established by women in Pakistan. In the same year, they also helped form the Women’s Action Forum (WAF), a pressure group campaigning against Pakistan’s discriminatory legislation, most notably against the Proposed Law of Evidence, where the value of a woman’s testimony was reduced to half that of a man’s testimony, and the Hadood Ordinances, where victims of rape had to prove their innocence or else face punishment themselves. Moreover, when Jahangir undertook the case of Saima Sarwar in 1999, who was given shelter at Dastak after leaving her husband, wanting a divorce and later gunned down by her family in an act of honour killing, Jahangir received death threats for representing Saima in her divorce proceedings.

But in Asma’s funeral prayers, we could see what kind of attitude they have shown to her and what kind of perception they had about her before

NIZAR JAN

Turbat

Published in Daily Times, February 18^th 2018.