Author: Zaffar Abbas
Publication: www.hinduvoice.net
Date: December 20, 2003
URL: http://www.hinduvoice.net/cgi-bin/maillist/mojo.cgi?flavor=archive&id=20031220164951&list=HV
BBC correspondent in Islamabad
The ruling will give women in Pakistan
more choice
Pakistan's supreme court has declared
that adult Muslim women can marry anyone of their own free will.
The ruling overturns an earlier
verdict by a high court that described such a marriage without the permission
of a father or brother as invalid.
Pakistan's human rights campaigners
have fought against the verdict for about six years.
They described it as contrary to
Islamic injunctions and discriminatory towards women.
Legal wrangling
The controversy over the right of
a woman to marry someone of her choice started when, in 1997, the Lahore
High Court re- opened an issue already settled by the country's Islamic
Sharia court.
In 1991 the Federal Sharia court
declared that a Muslim adult woman was well within her right to marry of
her free will, with or without the consent of her father or guardian, known
in the Islamic laws as Wali.
However, the Lahore high court,
in two separate decisions in 1997, declared that unless a woman had the
permission of the Wali, her marriage would be invalid.
As the affected couples challenged
the decision in the supreme court, a human rights campaigner, Asma Jehangir,
argued that the Lahore court's verdict virtually gave licence to the police
to arrest couples on false charges.
Freedom of choice
She told the supreme court that
more than 250 women were at present in jail on such charges only because
they had married without the consent of their parents.
The attorney general also opposed
the Lahore high court's verdict on the ground that it had no jurisdiction
to question the decision of the Federal Sharia Court in such matters.
The three-member supreme court,
in its verdict, overturned the decision of the high court, and declared
that an adult Muslim woman does not require the permission of a Wali, and
was allowed to marry of her free will.
The move has been welcomed by human
rights groups in the country, which say the decision will go a long way
towards giving women their due rights in the country.