Focus on court decision banning jirga trials

A high court judgment, banning all trials conducted under the jirga system in the southern province of Sindh, has been hailed by rights activists as a landmark decision likely to go some distance towards changing the women's rights landscape in Pakistan. A Sindh High Court (SHC) judge announced the verdict on Friday after he heard the petition of a young couple who had married of their own will but feared for their lives after being declared "karo-kari" (liable to be killed in the name of honour) by their tribes. "It's a landmark judgment. It's a very good judgment," Anis Haroon, the resident director of the women's advocacy and rights organisation Aurat (Women's) Foundation, told IRIN from the southern port city of Karachi. The Aurat Foundation, along with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and the Women's Action Forum (WAF) had earlier successfully petitioned the SHC in the high-profile case of Shaista Almani and her husband Balakh Sher, also from rural Sindh, who had similarly been declared liable to be killed for honour by their tribes. Last month, a two-member SHC bench allowed the couple to live together, ending months of uncertainty during which Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf intervened personally by ordering the Sindh government to ensure Almani's safety after she sought refuge in Karachi. Calling the court's verdict "a very good decision", HRCP joint-director Kamila Hyat told IRIN from the eastern city of Lahore that the verdict would go a long way towards proving that jirga decisions merely added to problems, rather than solving them. "It needed to have come a few years earlier, perhaps, but it's an important step in the right direction to recognise that jirga systems simply increase injustice rather than solving any of the problems," she stressed. "It's also clear that jirgas have delivered verdicts over the last few years, which all of us know about, which have amounted to huge violations of human rights," Hyat added. A sociologist with Shirkat Gah, a women's rights organisation, told IRIN, also from Lahore, that she was "absolutely delighted" by the court's decision, but agreed with Hyat that it had been "a long time in the coming". "I hope that it will be maintained," Farida Shaheed, the coordinator for Shirkat Gah, emphasised. "Furthermore, they have actually said that those who are taking these matters to jirgas will not be prosecuted. Which, I think, is very good and a very important step," she added. INFORMAL FORUMS "I think the informal forums that we have, which have existed for centuries now but are functioning in an extremely distorted way, are undermining people's equal rights, particularly women's - but not only women, as in this case there's a man and woman both who've decided to get married and were sentenced by the jirga," Shaheed continued. "These forums seem to be taking more and more strange positions regarding especially people who are marrying of their own free choice which is absolutely legally an entitlement for adults, male and female," she said. According to the HRCP annual report focusing on the state of human rights in Pakistan last year, over 600 women were killed in the name of honour in 2003. However, in early April, an opposition legislator in the Sindh provincial assembly, who is campaigning to save the life of a pregnant teenager also condemned to death by a tribal decree, told IRIN that unreported cases totalled over 3,000 women murdered for honour in the southern province alone during the calendar year. CHANGING THE WOMEN'S RIGHTS LANDSCAPE The 48-page statement by the high court judge said that according to an old law, jirga trials might have been permissible but, since the repeal of that law, the jirga system was unlawful and illegal and against the provisions of the constitution and the law of the land. "This is definitely a step forward [towards improving women's rights]," the Aurat Foundation's Haroon said. "It'll strengthen all those who are trying to implement the law of the land and you can take action against those who get involved in these extra-legal activities. But it'll still take time," she cautioned. Hyat agreed, saying that the reliance on the jirga system suggested that people did not place enough confidence in the judiciary but that the landmark verdict would go a long way towards changing that perception and ensuring that the judicial system was overhauled. "This lays stress on the need to reform the existing judicial system and cure it of its faults rather than setting up parallel bodies," she added. LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS "In the programme that I run, we do legal consciousness work. We are working with over 40 CBOs in the four provinces and, yes, access to legal recourse is a major problem. Nevertheless, with all of our experience - it's been some ten years now - it's absolutely clear that the position taken by the state still has enormous importance for people in their everyday lives," Shaheed said. "And if you tell them, whatever you do in your village or your tribe, the laws of the land say that these are the rights of women and men. People do give that importance. They have very quickly and rapidly changed the way that they lead their daily lives," she continued. Rights campaigners had long campaigned for the electronic media to be used as a conduit to educate people about their legal rights, Shaheed said. "We have been fighting for years for a mass education campaign on the electronic media which would simply inform people about what the laws of the land are," she stressed. In Sindh, the groups that Shirkat Gah worked with were the ones who brought up the issue of karo-kari, Shaheed explained. "They have researched it and documented it. There are enormous problems: it's not just the courts. The police procedures, the medical examinations - all of these are problematic," she said. But state institutions needed to recognise that the problems existed, she insisted. "I do think as a start, the state institutions must recognise that this is a problem and start taking steps to redress it, because you have to start somewhere," Shaheed stressed. LONG-TERM SOLUTION "I think, the only long-term solution to this is if people start getting prosecuted and sentenced. Unless you get that to happen, people feel they can get away with it, with complete impunity, which has been happening," Shaheed said. "It'll take a long time to change the attitudes of our police, the administration as well as a lot of people in the judiciary, who continue to give sentences even though the legal provision of grave and sudden provocation means the reason for giving lesser punishment has been removed from the law books, they're still using that in their judgments," she added. A system of accountability, with senior police officials and the administration overseeing it, might be a good first step, Shaheed maintained. "If people feel that they will be accountable to somebody, that someone is there to ask them a question, only then are they going to think twice about carrying out sentences of the jirga," she stressed.