Consultations to reform Christian inheritance law

The Committee for Justice and Peace (CJP), a minority rights NGO, is holding consultations to amend the Succession Act of 1925 that governs how Christians in Pakistan inherit property, money and goods. "This consultation, in particular, is focusing on the share Christian women get when it comes to inheritance, as women are generally denied their right by male members of their family," Naeem Shakir, head of CJP, told IRIN from the eastern city of Lahore. Half of the roughly 10 million Christians in Pakistan are female. The Succession Act dates back to British rule in the Indian subcontinent. The law was designed to deal with succession issues of colonial subjects belonging to different religious communities. Later, after the partition of India and Pakistan, the act continued to apply to various religious communities in Pakistan. Despite attempts to reform the law, little has changed in almost 80 years. Now, the Christian community itself has taken the initiative. The CJP recently conducted a survey covering about 300 Christian families. A questionnaire was distributed to find out about the current situation regarding the provision of inheritance to females. The findings of the survey suggested that, "At the very first, our women are not aware of their rights, and secondly they don't get their due share," Shakir noted. Senior judges, lawyers, archbishops, bishops of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Pakistan, and the heads of various other churches, are involved in the ongoing consultations, the CJP head said. "We are trying to have a consensus from the religious leadership as well, so that the law should be very much in accordance with Christianity." The result of these consultations would be presented to the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan (LJCP) in the form of a draft bill for further consideration to transform it into a law, he maintained.