President Musharraf Refuses To Reform Rape Laws

(Mukhtar Mai aka Mukhtaran Bibi, who was gang raped in an act of punishment sanctioned by her village elders in Pakistani Punjab in February 2002 because her younger brother was seen with a woman from another tribe, is now writing her own internet diary about her life and her concerns, as an uneducated woman from a remote village.)

Pakistan rape reform fails after President Musharraf caves in, says Jerome Taylor in The Independent.

“In a setback for women’s rights in Pakistan, the ruling party in Islamabad has caved in to religious conservatives by dropping its plans to reform rape laws.

“Statutes known as the Hudood ordinances, based on sharia law, currently operate in Pakistan. They require a female rape victim to produce four male witnesses to corroborate her account, or she risks facing a new charge of adultery.

“The ruling party in Islamabad, made up of a coalition of groups allied to President Pervez Musharraf, had hoped the new Protection of Women Bill would place the crime of rape within the country’s secular penal code, which works in tandem with sharia.

“But the government said rape would remain a crime punished by Islamic law yesterday after conservatives in an opposition group, Muttahida Majlis-I-Amal (MMA), threatened to walk out of parliament in protest if the government pushed ahead with reforms.

” ‘If there are four witnesses it will be tried under [Islamic law], if there are not, it will be tried under the penal code,’ said the law minister, Mohammad Wasi Zafar. ‘In the case of both adultery and rape, the judge will decide how to try the case.’ A new amended bill will now be presented to parliament on Wednesday.

“Most women refuse to report a rape for fear they will be treated as a criminal. Under current laws, a victim risks courting punishment if she reports a rape allegation as the Hudood ordinances criminalise all extra-marital sex. A woman who fails to prove that she was raped could then be charged with adultery under the same legislation.

“According to a 2002 report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a woman is raped every two hours and gang raped every eight hours. However, because of social taboos, discriminatory laws and victimisation of victims by police, campaigners say that the scale of rape is almost certainly higher.”

Meanwhile India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has warned Pakistan that the peace process between the two countries would be jeopardized if Pakistan continues to allow terrorists to use its soil to launch attacks against India.

” ‘But this terrorism will surely act as a dampener. I have said more than once that I can’t carry the Indian public opinion with me if terrorist acts continue to plague our polity. Whatever be the cause of that, that puts a dampener on India-Pakistan relations. Whether in Mumbai or elsewhere, these events certainly vitiate the atmosphere,’ Singh said.

” ‘But as far as the past was concerned, Pak-sponsored terrorism had certainly been a fact of life,’ he said.”