International Women’s Day: Pending laws Stuck in a limbo

All women-related laws that were pending by March 2013, 'lapsed' when the 2008 National Assembly ended its 5-year...

ISLAMABAD:

Except one Private Member’s Bill introduced in September 2013, there are no women-specific laws pending in the National Assembly at the moment.

The reason is simply that all women-related laws, which were pending by March 2013, “lapsed” when the 2008 National Assembly ended its five-year term.

In the months since, new legislators have only introduced one bill on women issues: a proposed amendment to a 2002 order, to enhance women’s political participation.



Four bills in the Senate during the same period, however, have called for anti-rape and anti-honour killing amendments to the criminal code, protection for female students and, indirectly, the rights of women domestic workers.

Human rights activists and women legislators realise that better laws and effective implementation is the one thing that can help women be empowered.

Pro-women laws help where there is a lacuna in existing laws or an implementation gap that demands affirmative action, says Maliha Zia, a lawyer and a gender manager at women rights NGO Aurat Foundation (AF).

To its credit, the 2008 parliament passed some landmark pro-women laws. But at least two women-related bills got stuck and were dissolved with the assembly, most importantly the Domestic Violence Bill which would have criminalised domestic violence at the federal level.

With approximately 990 cases of domestic abuse reported in 2012 and many more incidents unreported, penal code clauses for violence appear failing to protect women in the absence of domestic violence as a separate, punishable offence.

“Nobody recognises domestic violence as a crime,” Zia said, indicating social pressure and uncooperative police behaviour. “Even when a woman goes to register a complaint, police dismiss it as a family matter to be sorted out through mediation.”

Sindh and Balochistan have taken the lead in providing this additional legal cover which could help avoid women’s suffering in the private sphere. Punjab is expected to follow. The Sindh law criminalises domestic violence with specific punishment, but the Balochistan law surprisingly has not specified punishment leaving it to the courts to decide and the Punjab draft is more focused on post-domestic violence care than ending violence to begin with, according to Zia.

“(However) psychological and emotional abuse in domestic violence is an important detail in the Sindh and Balochistan bills that was missing in the federal draft bill,” said Khawar Mumtaz, chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women (NCSW), which has studied the provincial laws while reviewing the lapsed federal bill.

The NCSW’s reviews of women-specific laws that lapsed in 2013 have been sent to the law and justice division.

“Now it is up to someone in the assembly to introduce the bills again,” Mumtaz said, adding there was “no reason” the federal government should not follow the provincial examples.

The Sindh government appears ready to fix the age of marriage for girls at 18 instead of 16. This is as per international convention, health recommendations against adolescent pregnancies and national age limits for signing legal contracts.

It might be too early to criticise 68 women MNAs, some of whom are first-timers. “The new women MNAs need to find their feet first and know the system,” said Mumtaz.

But she said it was also an opportunity for them to monitor the implementation of laws passed by their predecessors. A recently formed caucus of women MNAs might provide the starting point for introspection and forward momentum, Mumtaz said.

PPP Senator Sughra Imam, who has introduced two bills for anti-rape and anti-honour killing amendments in criminal laws, said the caucus is an “effective” platform for building consensus among women MNAs on women-specific laws. Imam said the anti-rape and anti-honour killing bills are “basically to ensure that we start getting convictions in rape and honour killing cases.” She said hundreds of women are killed in Pakistan in the name of honour each year but there is not a single conviction. Imam said she hoped the law amendments would deter crimes against women.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 8^th, 2014.