Under pressure from the opposition and rights groups, the government is set to pass an anti-honour killing bill and an anti-rape bill during the joint sitting of parliament in an apparent move to curb the increasing trend of crimes against women. In wake of high profile murder of an outspoken social media star Qandeel Baloch, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the daughter of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, tweeted a day ago that the passage of a long-awaited legislation against honour killing will be approved within the week.
"The two pro-women bills will be discussed in a special parliamentary committee meeting, whose first meeting is going to be held today (Thursday), and the bill will be passed," she told a foreign news agency. Earlier, the proposed laws - Criminal Laws Amendment Bill, 2015, and the Anti-Rape Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill, 2015 - had lapsed as they were not passed by the National Assembly within the stipulated timeframe of 90 days.
The bills were originally laid in the Senate in January 2014 by a former Senator of Pakistan people's Party (PPP) Syeda Sughra Imam as a private member's bill. However, they could not make their way into the joint sitting of Parliament in April this year, mainly due to opposition from the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), a hard-liner Islamist political party.
A senior official at the National Assembly told Business Recorder that the bill is set to be presented in the joint-sitting of parliament, being summoned next month, as both senators and MNAs have started working on it. "Hopefully, it will be passed during the upcoming joint-sitting of parliament as the government has majority in National Assembly, while the opposition especially the PPP has already been supporting the bill since long," he added.
The anti-honour killing amendment bill 2015 was also included in the agenda of the National Assembly standing committee on interior for Thursday, but it could not be discussed as the officials of the Interior Ministry did not come to the meeting.
The government last week constituted a special body -Committee of Joint Sittings Bills - to expedite legislation on the long-delayed process. The sources said that the committee has been given the task by the Prime Minister to discuss the bill threadbare in presence of lawmakers belonging to religious political parties who are the major hurdle in passage of the bill.
A 10-member committee, headed by Minister for Law and Justice Zahid Hamid, will discuss the bills in the presence of the JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who is also a member of the body. The sources at the Law and Justice Ministry said that the committee headed by the Law Minister has also invited former Senator Sughra Imam to give her input as she had the moved the bill in Senate when she was a senator.
"The consensus has already developed between the government and the opposition over the anti-rape bill while the agreement on the anti-honour killing bill and is being discussed with religious political parties especially the JUI-F," they added. Senator Hamdullah said that the JUI-F is not against women, but simply wants that the law should be within the ambit of Islam. "The first word in the Holy Quran is about 'read', so we are not against the education of girls and if you want to pass a law it should not be out of context to what Islam says," he added.
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