Imagine being on death row, facing your imminent execution. You are a murderer, convicted of killing an innocent man; the Supreme Court has rejected your lawyers’ appeal for clemency and a weeklong reprieve they gave you is now up. Your execution date is to be set any day now. Perhaps by the time this column is printed, you will already have been hanged.

Bina Shah

This is the terrible situation for 50-year-old Imdad Ali, a Pakistani prisoner who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Ali has spent the last 14 years on death row, awaiting execution for murdering a religious leader back in 2002.

His family has been desperately trying to prove to the authorities that he is suffering from one of the worst forms of mental illness, and that this illness was a major factor in the murder.

Even though prison doctors have declared him legally insane, the courts have not heeded them, and Ali’s ‘black warrant’ could be signed any day now.

Imdad Ali’s execution would be a miscarriage of justice.

Pakistan has had a chequered track record with regards to human rights vis-à-vis state executions since last year’s lifting of the moratorium. A paraplegic, Abdul Basit, was nearly hanged but allowed a reprieve after human rights groups pleaded with the state not to make a man in a wheelchair go to the gallows.

The case of Shafqat Hussain was another troubling spot on Pakistan’s human rights record as his age at conviction was disputed up until the end; Hussain was eventually hanged, to protests from human rights groups both in Pakistan and abroad. Now, with the possibility that a mentally ill prisoner may be executed, we seem to have hit the trifecta of judicial missteps.

When sentencing a prisoner to death, courts must look at two things: the seriousness of the crime, but also the ability of a prisoner to understand fully what he has done.

This is a clear-cut line in the case of minors — juveniles do not suffer punishment as harsh as adults for this reason. For prisoners who suffer from mental illness, it is an even more complex issue because of the lack of education in Pakistan regarding the various mental disorders, the progression of the diseases, and how they affect mental functioning, including the ability to reason and understand the difference between right and wrong.

Then there is the burden of having to prove to a court of law that a prisoner was indeed mentally incompetent at the time the crime was committed, and unwell enough to not undergo execution, processes which take a great deal of time and money. Imdad Ali’s family is extremely poor, so his wife was unable to provide the expert witnesses that could have spoken on behalf of Ali in his initial trial in 2002.

While Ali was kept in jail, his mental condition became worse because he was not given proper care or treatment.

A medical report in 2012 found that he was actively suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which would certainly preclude his being executed. This report was apparently ignored by the Supreme Court, and Ali lost his appeal.

Mental illness is a big problem in prison populations, with many criminals suffering from various mental disorders, but legal experts around the world agree that those who are declared insane should not be put to death.

This violates international and Pakistani law, and it is also considered a cruel and inhuman punishment. While human rights groups like Amnesty Internatio¬nal assert that the mentally ill must be protected, the stigma against the mentally ill in Pakistan reduces empathy towards those prisoners. Even members of the legal community can be seen as prejudiced against the mentally ill, and may label such prisoners as manipulative or vicious, if not outright lying about their condition or making up its symptoms in order to escape punishment.

The court states that “lots of prisoners have mental illness”; all cannot be set free.

Yet it’s obvious that the justice system had a duty of care to Ali and other prisoners like him, which it failed. It ignored medical reports, denied Ali proper medical and mental care, and kept him in solitary confinement for the last three years, which would have certainly made his condition much worse.

These allegations are all violations of legal procedure which would point to a miscarriage of justice, as well as the violation of Ali’s human rights. A mistrial would be the obvious conclusion, not an execution.

The writer is an author.
Twitter: @binashah
Published in Dawn October 4th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

A Confession: I’m tired of hearing about women’s empowerment in Pakistan when the government is breaking all its promises made to Pakistani women on the topic of safety and security from gender-based violence. While debates rage about the Panama Papers, the situation in Karachi, CPEC, and the state of affairs in IHK, the issue of ‘honour’ killings has been swept under the rug. All the feel-good news about women entrepreneurs and girls’ education drives pales in comparison to the image of women’s bodies in funeral shrouds that appear on our newspaper pages with depressing regularity.

Bina Shah

Today, business continues uninterrupted of men murdering women for honour and suffering no repercussions. A parliamentary committee approved two bills on honour killing back in July, which addressed both honour killings and convictions for rape; the nation was told the bills would be voted on “in a matter of weeks”. Yet months have passed and no vote has been held, nor does it seem to be on the horizon in the foreseeable future.

The hoopla around the anti-honour killing bill was enacted merely to show to the international community that the government was “doing something” about the problem. In July we were told that the bill would not even be opposed by the religious parties, who usually block laws written to protect women and girls from abuse and violence in our heavily male-dominated society. But instead of an anti-honour killing law, what Pakistan got was a cybercrime law in August, pushed through parliament and the Senate as if their lives depended on it.

The issue of ‘honour’ killings has been swept under the rug.

I can’t imagine the frustration of Senator Sughra Imam, who has spent much of her parliamentary career the past two years trying to get a bill tabled which eliminates the loopholes and lacunae in the parts of the Pakistan Penal Code which already address honour killings. It must be extremely disheartening to be a parliamentarian, to make Herculean efforts to bring about good laws, and then see all that effort go to waste simply because the government does not deem it a priority after saying exactly the opposite.

The proposed honour killing law must be made watertight, so that the crime of honour killing is non-compoundable, meaning that the parties cannot enter into a compromise and have the accused acquitted of the crime. On the other hand, it also has to make sure that anyone committing an honour killing doesn’t change their plea and claim it was a murder over something else, a domestic argument, for example, in order to escape punishment under this particular law.

MNA Nafisa Shah is in the process of publishing a book on honour killings in upper Sindh, based on field research she conducted for her PhD at Oxford. Her experiences as a journalist and as district nazim of Khairpur, make her one of the foremost experts on the practice of honour killing in Pakistan today.

In upper Sindh, she observed the practice had become something of a business: men who killed their wives for honour would forgive the man co-accused of the so-called “affair” — if the co-accused paid a fine or supplied the “widower” with a new bride from his own family. However, in most cases, Shah says in an interview with a magazine, “honour acts as a mask for instrumental coldblooded violence”. She knows that the key to stopping honour killings is not just legislation, but community engagement, mediation that doesn’t involve using women as barter, and the wholesale protection of women.

According to Shah, “The state, the law, and the power elite are jointly implicated in the immunity that the family and kin enjoy in taking lives of men and women accused of damaging family honour.” Implementation of the law, prosecutions, and convictions promise to be extremely challenging in a country whose legal system is already under tremendous pressure, and there’s already a sense of defeat before the law has even been passed, which might explain the lack of impetus behind it. But millions of Pakistani women haven’t yet lost hope that they may be the recipients of justice from a country that has promised them equality and protection.

As terrible a crime as honour killing is, it would be equally criminal to show, by refusing to pass an anti-honour killing law, that their hopes are misfounded, and that being killed for honour is just another one of the indignities you have to live with because you are a Pakistani woman.

The writer is an author.
Twitter: @binashah
Published in Dawn September 6th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

For as long as I can remember, people have been talking about the possibility of revolution in Pakistan. They were originally inspired, or perhaps frightened, by the Iranian Revolution in 1979, when ordinary Iranians rose up under the leadership of the clergy and overthrew Western-backed Reza Shah Pahlavi.

As an intellectual exercise, Pakistanis have always wondered whether a similar revolution could take place in Pakistan, and if so, what would that revolution look like? Some envision it as a religious revolution where the Pakistani religious right wing encourages its militants to come out on the streets and seize power and enact Sharia throughout the country. Others imagine a revolution along the lines of the French revolution, where the have-nots slaughter the haves in a bloody uprising, and take control of their land and property.

Most people dismiss the idea of these kinds of revolutions, however, in light of the cloud of apathy in which Pakistanis live. The status quo, they think, is here to stay. Well, the revolution is already here, but it doesn`t quite look like what people imagined it to be.

Nor is it being enacted by the people they expected it to encompass. Pakistan`s revolution is a women`s revolution, and although we`re in its early stages, it`s already looking powerful enough to change a nation.

Although women have always participated in political revolutions around the world, the women`s liberation movement in the 1970s was the first time that women, mostly in the developed world, joined together to agitate for their rights. While many offshoots of feminism, including radical feminism and socialist feminism, developed from this movement, women in countries like Pakistan did not feel its benefits directly in their lives.

Pakistani women had their own problems to deal with when Bhutto started to Islamise Pakistan. Then Gen Zia picked up the baton after deposing Bhutto, hurtling the country towards even greater heights of gender discrimination. And he wielded that baton unmercifully on Pakistani women`s bodies.

Pakistani women have never truly held full authority over their own bodies; their bodies belonged to their families, to their male protectors, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, who decided how and when to dispose of them through marriage or other means.

Now the state was codifying the control of women`s bodies, prescribing jailing, lashing and even execution for adultery and for the crime of being raped. Encasing them in chadar and chardiwari, repressing their very existence until the practice of pre-Islamic Arabs burying their baby girls at birth started to look less painful compared to how Pakistani women were being symbolicallyburied throughout their lives. And while Zia is long gone, regressive societal attitudes towards women live on.

Reading Ta-nehisi Coates`s excellent book on race in America, Between the World and Me where Coates writes of the state`s ability to enact destruction on black bodies with no repercussions for perpetrators of those attacks, it struck me that the same thing happens to the bodies of women in this country.

Here in Pakistan, families enact the violence, but the state is complicit through its inaction. Without legal and social reform, Pakistan`s girls and women will continue to be shot in the head for trying to exercise their own autonomy. Men will continue to enslave women while pretending to be their protectors and caretakers. Half the country`s population will continue to function as second-rate citizens, and justice and peace will forever remain elusive in Pakistan.

The furore of the religious right against the Women`s Protection Act in Punjab, and the anger and hysteria about something that is morally unarguable a woman`s right tonot be abused, thrown out of her house, even killed proves that a rotten nerve has been exposed to the light. We cannot accept this situation as the status quo anymore. Yet as proven in the American Civil War, men do not give up their slaves easily.

Revolution begins when a human beingsays `Enough.` Pakistan`s women have finally said `enough`. Enough of the domestic violence, the sexual harassment and abuse, the beatings, the acid attacks, the `honour` killings. Enough of keeping girls illiterate, of stopping women from collecting their inheritance, from owning property.

Enough blood their own has been spilled.

Pakistan`s women are raising not just their voices, but their bodies. They are insisting on the right to be educated, to work, to live in safety and security. Women parliamentarians are taking up their cause in the legislature, enacting laws to protect them. Nobody can reverse this social awakening.

It may seem like the path to chaos and societal destruction, but when the smoke clears, it will change Pakistan for the better. This revolution may even rescue us from the morass of degeneracy that has gripped us for so long we no longer know what a normal environment for women looks like.

The writer is an author. Twitter: @binashah

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

By Bina Shah
Mar 1 2016 (Dawn, Pakistan)

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy`s record second win at the Oscars for her short document ary A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness is proof that lightning can actually strike twice. Hardly four years ago, Chinoy was standing at the same stage in Los Angeles, accepting an Oscar for her documentary Saving Face, about Pakistani victims of acid attacks. Chinoy`s current Oscar winner examines a no less painful subject, honour killings in Pakistan.

The story centres around 18-year-old Saba, who fell in love with a man of her own choice; her father shot her in the head and threw her in a river to avenge the family`s `honour` Saba incredibly survived her ordeal and went to court against her family. Today, she stands as a powerful witness against these abhorrent crimes as one of the few to actually escape death at the hands of a family intent on avenging their slighted honour with a blood sacrifice.

The amount of global conversation about the movie and its subject is uncomfortable for many Pakistanis to bear. They don`t like being singled out as the country where women are killed for honour and perpetrators get away because of legal loopholes that permit a victim`s heirs to `forgive` the murderer. Yet if we can manage to bear our discomfort with the same grace and patience that Saba must bear the scars on her face, we might be able to enact a real change in Pakistani law, if not the attitudes behind the criminal act of honour killings.

Chinoy has stated in interviews that her real hope for this film is to see it put enough pressure on Pakistan`s government that it will enact an anti-honour killing law that has been languishing in the Senate since 2014.

This particular law, according to senator Sherry Rehman, herself an ardent champion of women`s rights, was passed in the National Assembly but is still in committee, meaning that it can`t yet be considered legal in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, women are still being killed for honour every day, in the name of tradition; 1,000 women a year, says Chinoy, are killed in Pakistan in honour crimes.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took notice of the Oscar buzz surrounding Chinoy`s film and hosted a special screening of the movie in late February, the week before the Oscars.

Afterwards, he promised to make real efforts to eradicate the loopholes that allow perpetrators to escape unpunished for this crime.

Given the amount of injustices that exist in Pakistan today, would that a film could be made about each one that might be nominated for an Oscar. Then perhaps our government might pay attention to all the problems with the laws that on paper address theseissues but in practice are so ineffectively implemented.

Chinoy`s film and its Oscar win may be the push the government needs to enact an allencompassing law against honour killings. It comes within days of the Punjab government enacting the Punjab Women`s Protection Bill 2015, a landmark ruling that comprehensively penalises particular crimes against women including domestic violence, emotional, economic and psychological abuse, cyber crime, stalking and abetting of offenders.

This law is different from previous iterations in that it also proposes mechanisms to implement the laws, including violence against women centres, toll-free helplines, and restraining orders that can be enforced by fitting perpetrators with GPS tracking devices to ensure they stay away from the women they are terrorising.

For the first time in our society, the government has spelled out the various ways inwhich women are not just physically but also emotionally and mentally abused. And it has placed itself firmly on the side of the victim ratherthanthe aggressor, a sea change in our heavily patriarchal society.

Don`t expect societal attitudes towards gender-based violence to change overnight. Assoon as the women`s protection bill was passed, the religious right-wing was out making statements in the newspapers and appearing on television to protest the destruction of the family and the weakening of men`s standing in society. But for the first time, their protests rang hollow.

With more Pakistanis growing aware of women`s right to live in peace and safety, what is seen as religiously sanctioned male supremacy can no longer act as a cloak under which all these crimes remain hidden forever, in complete opposition to Islam`s true stance of protecting women from them.

No doubt there will be people who dismiss Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy as a `traitor` or an `agent` bent on disgracing Pakistan with her important films. To them, she has besmirche d their honour by bringing worldwide attention to a major injustice in our society. But if it helps to do away with the rot in our system that allows women and girls to die in the name of `honour`, the Oscar spotlight would be welcome in our darkest corners.

The writer is an author.

Twitter: @binashah

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