Now Hire Female Advocates in Pakistan For Zina Cases

Zina Cases and Female Advocates in Pakistan:

Thus, the writers of the Penal concluded that they would not throw into a scale already loaded against women, the additional weight of the penal law Code additional their apprehensions proved only too true after the Ordinance came in. According to the female Advocates in Pakistan, there were only a handful of reported cases of adultery in the pre-Zina Ordinances period. As soon as the law was changed to include women within the scope of its punishment, allegations of Zina started to run into thousands. This indicates that as long as only the male could be punished for adultery, there was a reluctance to prosecute.

Ordinance:

The Ordinance became a tool in the hands of those who wished to exploit women. Indeed, the number of prosecutions under the Zina Ordinance multiplied. In some places, they became the majority of the cases being dealt with by the police. Data from the Women Police Station Karachi South, for example, show that around 80% of the cases registered are under this law. This was the situation in one police station. The nationwide total for any given year can reasonably be expected to run into tens of thousands. Also significant is that the national number of appeals in Zina cases for the entire seven-year period between 1980 and 1987 stood at a paltry 3,399. Even allowing for the fact that a few convicted women might not have appealed, this number strongly suggests that most women who were tried under this Ordinance had been acquitted, and hence there was no question of an appeal.

Convicted:

Thus, not surprisingly, in 1987, there were only 53 women in the prisons of the Punjab who were convicted of Zina. To add to the already high acquittal rate at the trial court level, 35%% of the people convicted in that court are dismissed at the appellate level by the Federal Shariat Court. The former Chief Justice of Pakistan, Justice Mohammad Afzal Zullah, confirmed that 95% of all Hudood cases in the superior courts had been decided in favor of women. According to the female Advocates in Pakistan, this low conviction rate indicates that many Zina allegations are either false or based on suspicion.

Victim of Law:

This 1s only one of the aspects of the exploitative nature of the law. Jail figures also confirm that women become frequent victims of this law. For example, a sample survey of the Central Jail, Lahore, shows that roughly one-third of all female prisoners are accused of Zina. According to the 1988 figures, 47% of the imprisoned women in Punjab were either convicted of Zina or were facing trials for this offense. Recent figures from July 1997 show that 38 out of 91 under-trial prisoners were facing the Zina charge in the Women Jail of Multan. Data from other jail locations are as follows: D. G. Khan, 16 out of 20; Rawalpindi 22 out of 89, and, Faisalabad, 16 out of 33 Not only do women themselves suffer the rigors and harassment associated with being in jail, several of them also have their infants with them least one-fourth of all women prisoners are obliged to do so.