Pakistan court upholds killer’s death sentence after marriage refusal — Dawn
Pakistan’s Supreme Court in Islamabad rejected Muhammad Kamran’s request to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. The man was convicted of murdering a woman after she and her family refused to accept his marriage proposal, Dawn reports.
Court rejects request for leniency
The case was heard by a three-judge bench comprising Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar, Salahuddin Panhwar and Ishtiaq Ibrahim. In a nine-page ruling authored by Justice Kakar, the court criticized patriarchal customs and gender-based violence.
Kamran spent about 15 years on death row. The court stressed that serving 14 or 15 years does not make a convict equivalent to someone who was initially sentenced to life imprisonment: the difference lies in the sentence handed down by the court, not merely in the number of years behind bars.
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A woman’s right to consent
The court noted that marriage is a voluntary union requiring the free consent of both parties. The ruling states that in patriarchal systems, men sometimes believe they are entitled to choose a woman and claim her regardless of her will, perceiving refusal as an attack on their own “honor.”
The bench mentioned the customs of ghag, suara and watta-satta, under which decisions about a woman’s marriage may be made by others. In particular, ghag involves a man unilaterally declaring a woman to be his bride without her consent; Pakistan criminalized this practice under a 2013 law of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Refusal cannot be a justification
The court stressed that an attempt to portray a woman’s lawful refusal as provocation or a mitigating circumstance is unacceptable. It also recalled that Pakistan is a party to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Article 16 of which obliges states to ensure women’s right to freely choose a spouse and enter into marriage only with their full and free consent.
