The gruesome murder of Noor Mukadam in federal capital, Islamabad, is the latest in a series of attacks on women in Pakistan, where rights activists say such gender-based assaults are on the rise as the country barrels toward greater extremism.
Mukadam was the daughter of a diplomat, and her status as a member of the country’s elite has shown a spotlight on the relentless and growing violence against women in Pakistan.
However, the majority of women who are victims of such violence are among the country’s poor and middle classes, and their deaths are often not reported or, when they are, often ignored.
Still, Pakistan’s Parliament this month failed to pass a bill that seeks to protect women from violence in the home, including attacks by a husband. Instead, it asked an Islamic ideology council to weigh in on the measure.
Numerous public figures have urged Prime Minister Imran Khan to get the Domestic Violence Bill 2021 passed without any further delay. So why the bill hasn’t passed yet?
Violence against women in Pakistan
Data collected from domestic violence hotlines across the country showed a 200% increase in domestic violence between January and March last year, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released earlier this year. The numbers were even worse after March, when COVID-19 lockdowns began, according to the report.
In 2020, Pakistan was near the bottom of the World Economic Forum’s global gender index, coming in at 153 of 156 countries, ahead of only Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan, which held the last spot despite billions of dollars spent and 20 years of international attention on gender issues there.
What is new in the Domestic violence bill?
This new piece of legislation would decree that domestic violence is not limited to physical abuse only — a departure from the earlier definition that mostly covered beatings.
The bill states that domestic violence shall mean all acts of physical, emotional, psychological, sexual and economic abuse committed by a respondent against women, children, elderly, vulnerable persons or any other person with whom the respondent is or has been in a domestic relationship that causes fear, physical or psychological harm to the aggrieved person.
By expanding the type of violence, the new domestic violence bill thus plugs loopholes in the Pakistan Penal Code by making punishable actions not covered in the older law. The bill recommends punishment of six months to three years in prison and up to Rs100,000 in a fine for domestic violence.
Why has this new bill become controversial?
On July 5, 2021, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Parliamentary Affairs Babar Awan wrote a letter to National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser seeking a review of the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill, 2021 by the Council of Islamic Ideology.
In the letter, Awan pointed out that the bill, initially passed by the National Assembly (NA) in April this year, was referred back to the Lower House of Parliament after the Senate suggested amendments to the proposed law.
It adds, “Most importantly it is being highlighted that the bill contravenes the Islamic injunctions and way of life as enshrined in responsibility of the state in Article 31 of the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan”.
People started reacting to this news on both ends of the spectrum, with some expressing alarm that a council of 12 men would be allowed to decide such matters. The rightwing Jamaat-e-Islami Senator Mushtaq Ahmed is one of the most vocal opponents of the bill.
CII’s earlier ruling
In 2016, the CII had proposed a bill that allowed a husband to “lightly” beat his wife “if needed” and prohibited mixing of the genders in schools, hospitals and offices.
That proposal had come under fire by rights activists. Farzana Bari, human rights activist and academic at Quaid-i-Azam University, had termed the proposed bill unconstitutional.
“Allowing a husband to beat his wife, in any way, is against Pakistan’s Constitution and the international laws and treaties that Pakistan has signed and is bound by. This Council is a burden on the Pakistani taxpayer and bringing a bad name to Muslims throughout the world,” she had said.
