Village council members arrested for
allegedly ordering rape of teenager as punishment for sexual assault committed
by her brother
By Haroon
Janjua and Michael Safi
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A
villager points to a house where a teenage girl was raped in Muzaffarabad, a
suburb of the
central
city of Multan. Photograph: Ss Mirza/AFP/Getty Images
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Police in Pakistan have arrested 26 members
of a village council for allegedly ordering the rape of a teenager as
punishment for a sexual assault committed by her brother.
The girl, 17, was raped last week at the
direction of the council as revenge for a sexual assault allegedly committed
two days earlier against a child in the same village by the teenage girl’s
brother.
The man who was ordered to rape the teenager
was the brother of the initial victim, local police official Malik Rashid said.
He said the state would act as plaintiff in
the case and refuse to free those convicted in exchange for compensation, an
option available under the country’s Islamic legal system. “The state will not
give up any sort of agreement,” Rashid said.
The incident, which occurred in Muzaffarabad,
a village near Multan in the southern province of Punjab, came to light after
the teenage girl’s mother complained to police.
The mother alleged in the complaint that
members of the council were present at the time of the punitive rape. Medical
examinations have reportedly confirmed sexual assaults in both cases.
On Thursday the chief justice of Pakistan’s
supreme court, Saqib Nisar, ordered a police inquiry on Thursday into the
incident, which has sparked uproar in the country and abroad.
“Pakistan’s judiciary has time and again
declared these local councils to be unconstitutional and [have] no legal
standing,” said lawyer and activist Asma Jahangir. “Such decisions and parallel
justice should end now.”
The village councils, or jirgas, are a
traditional means of settling disputes in Pakistan’s rural areas, where the
legal system can be mistrusted or out of reach.
The councils are illegal but such “honour”
punishments are still common, especially in rural areas. In another case that
gained international prominence, a village council in 2002 ordered the gang
rape of Mukhtar Mai as revenge for taking her rapists to court.
Mai was offered refuge in other countries but
chose to stay and open a school for rural girls. She tweeted on Thursday that
the case showed “we are still in 2002”.
Her story inspired an opera, Thumbprint,
which opened in New York in 2014 and premiered in Los Angeles last month.
The chief minister of Punjab, Shehbaz Sharif,
has suspended several police officers including the Multan police chief for
delays in conducting arrests.
“Unfortunately, there could not be a worse
example of extreme negligence by the police,” he said.
He told a press conference: “I will not sit
with ease until all the criminals in this case are punished in accordance to
the law.”
Tahira Abdullah, a human rights activist,
said the jirga councils invariably marginalised women and “such decisions have
ruined the lives of thousands”.
“Justice is the right of each and every
citizen of the country and only a fair legal system can provide that, not such
councils,” she said.
Pakistan is regarded as one of the most
dangerous places in the world to be a woman, with 2014 research finding that
each day six women were kidnapped, four were murdered, four were raped and
three took their own lives.
More than 1,000 women and girls in the country
are murdered in “honour killings” each year, according to the Aurat Foundation,
a human rights group.
In one high-profile case last year, a social
media celebrity who also lived in Multan was strangled by her brother for
posting videos and pictures he considered too provocative.
Qandeel Baloch, 26, was compared to Kim
Kardashian for her subversive use of social media and sly, sometimes satirical
displays of sexuality in the deeply conservative country.
British citizen Samia Shahid was murdered in
Punjab last year by her father and first husband for divorcing and remarrying
without permission.
A police report said the 28-year-old’s family
felt “dishonoured” by the divorce that Shahid had organised in a sharia court
in Bradford in 2012 after a brief and unhappy marriage.
In October, Pakistan’s parliament passed
legislation that introduced the death penalty for rape and closed a loophole
permitting perpetrators of honour killings to go free if forgiven by the
victim’s family.
But the legislation, which was introduced
against the objections of hardline religious groups, still permits victim’s
families to waive the death penalty for offenders.
