Author: Press Trust of India
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: May 3, 2004
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_726276,0000.htm
An estimated 80 per cent of women
prisoners in Pakistan are in jail because they failed to prove rape charges,
and found themselves locked up on adultery convictions, according to a
2004 report by the National Commission on the Status of Women.
Death by stoning for adultery, amputation
for theft, and the prospect of an adultery conviction for women who cannot
prove they were raped: These are aspects of a medieval justice system that
still prevails in Pakistan under its grim Hudood Ordinances. They are a
series of 25 year-old Islamic laws which run parallel to the mainstream
British-inherited Pakistani Penal Code.
Under the Hudood laws, anyone unable
to prove rape, but equally unable to disprove extramarital sexual intercourse,
can be convicted of adultery.
A push is underway by women's and
right groups to repeal the laws.
But they are meeting stiff opposition
from powerful Islamic conservatives, who see the laws as "divinely inspired"
because they are based on teachings of the Koran.
MP Samia Raheel Qazi, vice-president
of the hard-line Islamic party Jamaat-i- Islami's women's commission, defends
the Hudood laws as "the laws that are given in the Koran, and Allah (God)
does not give humans the right to change them."
The laws were introduced in 1979
by Islamist military dictator General Zia-ul Haq, who believed Pakistan
-- the world's second largest Muslim country -- should have an Islamic
justice system.
