YET ANOTHER WOMEN'S COMMISSION

September 5, 2003 – (The Daily Times, Editorial – Pakistan) The National Commission on the Status of Women under the chairmanship of Justice Majida Rizvi has once again recommended that the Hudood Law be repealed as it degraded women, deprived them of their full rights and made the law of evidence iniquitous. Two members of the Commission - one of them is understandably Dr S.M. Zaman from the Council of Islamic Ideology - have not agreed to the recommendations as against 16 members who have backed them. The Commission was given the task of improving the status of women in Pakistan in May 2002.

Its chairman says: "For the last more than two decades women have been the worst victims of this most unscrupulous legislation by the then military regime". The Commission has recommended not only the repeal of the Hudood laws but also repeal of sections of the Penal Code that carry enabling provisions.
The Commission's report will go before the National Assembly where, needless to say, it will be torn to shreds. The opposition there is combined and is subservient to the strong clerical presence forming the spearhead of the PPP and the PML-N whose leaders are in exile.

The MMA will have none of it and therefore the Jamali government might decide to shelve it and not cause more fireballs to be thrown on his already overcrowded plate of unresolved issues. The PPP will be embarrassed because a similar commission was set up by it in 1994 under Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid but whose recommendations had landed before the next party in power, the PML-N, who did not even acknowledge that they existed. Looking at this situation, one of the members of the Commission has wisely stated that General Musharraf, instead of forming another Commission, should have quietly implemented the recommendations of the earlier Commission and made the whole thing a part of his famous LFO.

The 1997 recommendation came out of a Commission set up by the PPP government. Before that a kind of jurisprudence was established on them by Begum Zari Sarfaraz who was made to head the Commission by General Zia. The pile on the 'rejected' shelf of the concerned ministry grows by another inch in 2003. Let us look at what the earlier commissions demanded. The most unjust provisions against women exist within the ambit of Criminal Law because under it women attract the mischief of the FIR. In cases where a woman is witness to murder, her testimony is half that of a man's under 'hadd'. If the same case is heard under 'tazir', the judge can impose maximum punishment without reducing her testimony to half. Logic (qiyas) and 'ihsan' (human sympathy) say that 'tazir' is a better mode of Islamic adjudication than 'hadd' wherein the judge is bound by the law of 'shahadat' (witness) and can't use his discretion to maintain justice.

If a woman is raped she is under obligation to bring four male pious eye-witnesses to prove her charge. Rape is equated with fornication whereunder Islam wants to prevent wrongful accusation. If the victim can't prove rape she is punished under 'qazf' (wrongful accusation).

This really means that a raped woman is ill-advised to make an accusation under the Zina Ordinance. The Supreme Court is on record as saying that 95 per cent of the cases thus brought against women are finally decided in their favour but the movement of the case from the lower courts to the Supreme Court takes years during which the accused woman suffers. In one 'thana' prison (Karachi South) earlier examined, 80 per cent of the imprisoned women were facing charges under the Zina Ordinance. Most cases pertained to marriage of choice which the accusing party wanted to undo through the Zina Ordinance.

The police exploited the FIR and hunted the lawfully married woman down under the assumption of Islamic justice. The Hudood Laws "were conceived and drafted in haste and are not in conformity with the injunctions of Islam". 'Tazir', which is bound by Qanoon-e-Shahadat (1984), is applicable to all laws.
Financial support is possible to the divorced woman under the Quranic injunction: 'For divorced women a provision in kindness: a duty for those who ward off evil' (2:241). This provision was supported during General Zia's Islamic dictatorship by an Islamic scholar of note, Rafiullah Shehab. The point has been forcefully made by Pakistan leading lawyer Ms Rashida Patel in her recent book 'Woman versus Man: Socio-Legal Gender Inequality in Pakistan'. The relevant 'ayat' compensates for the totally un-Quranic way the husband is allowed under Islam to divorce his wife with three simultaneous pronouncements of 'talaq'.

The state should also stop the current malpractice in the courts to demand evidence from women asking for 'khula' (divorce), which the Quran forbids. 'Ijtehad' on two well-known Quranic references to polygamy, including the one which says, 'Ye are never able to be fair and just as between women even if it is your ardent desire', (Nisa:129) is urgently needed. This interpretation has been made the basis of the ban on polygamy in Tunisia and Turkey. The 'ulema' in parliament will start fuming and will treat the Commission Report as 'haram' because they don't believe in studying the ground facts. They never study social statistics and have absolutely no idea of the extent of injustice that these laws have exposed the poor female population to.

Posted in South Asia Citizens Wire, September 5, 2003