Posted on 12/20/2003 9:10:13 AM PST by blam
Pakistani women to marry freely
By Zaffar Abbas
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.
Can they choose any religion of their own free will???
"more than 250 women were at present in jail on such charges only because they had married without the consent of their parents."
Remember--it is the declared goal of islam to establish a worldwide theocracy with the koran as the constitution and the shariah as international law.
1) MOAB
2) PAVE
3) REPEAT
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