Police officers walk past Pakistan’s Supreme Court building, in Islamabad, Pakistan, April 6, 2022. REUTERS
ISLAMABAD:
The Supreme Court has raised the alarm about systemic impunity for violent crimes against women, noting that the justice system continues to fail those most vulnerable to brutality.
In a seven-page judgment written by Justice Athar Minallah, the court sounded the alarm on the rising cases of violence against women, noting that the court, for the past twelve months, has exclusively dealt with appeals arising from convictions involving capital punishment or life imprisonment.
“Alarmingly, a significant number of these cases involve victims who are defenseless women (mothers, sisters and wives) brutally murdered for reasons that are often petty, questionable or based on misplaced notions of honour.”
The ruling said these cases “reveal a justice system that appears to serve the privileged and not the weak.”
A three-judge court, by a 2-1 majority, upheld the death sentence of a husband who murdered his 28-year-old wife inside a family court room in Gujarat. Judge Malik Shahzad Ahmad Khan dissented and converted the death sentence to life imprisonment.
The majority held that the manner in which the murder was committed was “brutal and shocking”, bringing it within the scope of fasad-fil-arz under section 299(ee) of the Pakistan Penal Code.
The record shows that the deceased had been admitted in Dar-ul-Aman, Gujrat, on December 18, 2013, and police officers had taken him to the family court. She was sitting inside the courtroom, waiting for her case to be called, when the appellant entered and fatally shot her several times in front of the president.
The ruling highlighted deep deficiencies in investigation and accountability in cases involving marginalized women. He noted that investigations into crimes against disadvantaged or disadvantaged people are often “compromised, poorly conducted or deliberately ineffective”, while cases involving people with a privileged social status receive much more attention and institutional action.
“Public attention, institutional response and media coverage appear to be proportionally influenced by the social status of the victims when the crime occurs within a privileged class, the investigation tends to be vigorous and the topic receives extensive coverage in both the electronic and print media.”
“However, violence against women belonging to disadvantaged and marginalized segments of society rarely evokes urgency or a similar institutional response,” the ruling notes.
She added that the number of cases heard by the court over the past year “reveals a serious lack of deterrence” in crimes against disadvantaged women.
The ruling warned that “a state where such impunity prevails – where women can be murdered or brutalized without consequences and justice depends on privilege – has failed in its most fundamental duty to protect the life, dignity and equality of half of its population.”
He added that the selective application of justice reflects “the moral collapse of governance and society”, transforming the State into a “domain of a few, for a few.”
“A State that protects only the powerful and abandons the most vulnerable has stopped functioning as a republic governed by the Constitution.”
The court expressed the hope that the legislature and the executive “will take effective measures to put an end to such impunity.”
