Woman opposes the Protection against Violence Law
Advocate Naheed Baig files a petition against Women Protection against Violence Law 2016.
Dunya News Report (Humaira Sajid)
ISLAMABAD - The Punjab Protection of Women against Violence Act 2016 has been challenged in the Federal Shariat Court (FSC), after the dismissal of a petition by Lahore High Court to declare it void.
Advocate Naheed Baig had filed the petition saying that enforcement of the bill would disrupt the institution of the family system of Pakistan. She had asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional.
Lahore High Court (LHC) Justice Shahid Waheed on Wednesday turned down the request to hear the petition challenging The Protection of Women against Violence Act 2016. The judge observed that the petition was related to the implementation of Islamic principles and the LHC had no power to take up such a matter.
In addition, he observed that under Article 203(d) of the constitution, Federal Shariat Court was the proper forum to take up such a matter. On these remarks, the petitioner counsel requested to withdraw the petition and the judge allowed it.
Dr Aslam Khaki, a professor of Islamic Law and the advocate of Supreme Court, moved the petition under Article 203-B, C and D of Constitution. He hoped that the Act should be examined in the light of Quran and the Sunnah, while section 7(d) & (e), of the Act 2016 must be declared un-Islamic.
He said though the Act seems to be combating violence but it will not serve the purpose as some of its sections are revolting Islamic principles in the light of Quran and the Sunnah. He appealed that these provisions needed to be declared invalid as provided in the Act 203-D of Constitution.
Dr Khaki regretted in his petition, punctuating verses of the Holy Quran, that the section was against Islamic provisions since it was unilateral and gender-biased.
“The section is based on the NGOs’ slogan that the man is always guilty,” the petition regretted, adding that the law did not contain any mechanism for filing a complaint against a woman for causing mental and psychological trauma to her husband.
This section, the petition contended, was against the dignity of man and hence against Islam and the Constitution. To substantiate, the petition quoted the following verse from the Holy Quran: “We bestowed dignity on the children of Adam and provided them with rides on the land and in the sea and provided them with a variety of good things and made them much superior to many of those whom we have created.”
"The entire law is wrong," Muhammad Khan Sherani, the head of the Council of Islamic Ideology also stated in a news conference, citing verses from the Qur’an to point out that the law was "un-Islamic."
Moreover, Fazlur Rehman, the chief of the Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam, told journalists: "This law makes a man insecure and it is an attempt to make Pakistan a Western colony again."
Senator Farhatullah Babar, during discussion on the annual report of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) said such opinions demonstrate how dangerously conservative and out of touch with the times CII and the so-called clerics are at present.
The Women s Protection Act, passed by Pakistan s largest province of Punjab last week, gives unprecedented legal protection to women from domestic, psychological and sexual violence. It also calls for the creation of a toll-free abuse reporting hot line and the establishment of women s shelters.
However, since it passed in the Punjab Assembly, powerful Pakistani religious bodies as well as a few politicians in cold sweat denounced the new law as being in conflict with the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, as well as Pakistan s constitution.
According to the women’s rights advocacy group “Aurat Foundation”, the statistics for the Year 2013 of the cases reported against women violence were 5,800 solely in Punjab. Those cases represented 74 percent of the national total that year, the latest for which data is available.
The Awaz Foundation Centre for Development mentioned in its report as many as 2,713 cases of violence against women have been reported in 15 districts of southern Punjab since January 2012, giving some measure of the scale regarding this issue.
A small snapshot of the violence being wrought on the women of Pakistan can be witnessed from the recent case of Mr. Tariq, a resident of Choa Saidan Shah District Chakwal, who was accused of raping his 24-year-old daughter-in-law and a mother of two kids, said an official of Kohsar Police Station.
Four in every five women in Pakistan face some form of domestic abuse, observed a strategy paper. The report was one of the two documents discussed at an event attended by various non-governmental organizations, campaigning under the banner “We Can”. The two critical documents were an impact assessment report and a strategy paper.
According to the strategy paper, 80 per cent of Pakistani women experience domestic violence, while one in every three experiences some form of violence such as rape, honor killing, immolation, acid attacks and verbal or psychological abuse.
Women are not only weak and poor in the Pakistani society, but bear another form of discrimination in the shape of laws that are made to subjugate and oppress them, the paper added.
Almost all the indicators related to women’s rights illustrated that Pakistan has extremely high levels of gender discrimination and is among one of the few countries to have a negative sex ratio with 100 women to 109 men. Due to this statistical data, laws like the Women Protection against Violence Act 2015 are becoming a compulsion in the conservative Pakistani society.
