PESHAWAR, Feb 26: The procedural changes made in the law for checking the misuse of the Zina Ordinance against women has become useless as police have been misusing other laws for victimising them.

It is learnt that in a number of cases, police arrested women under section 294 of the Pakistan Penal Code, dealing with obscene acts because after the said amendments police could no longer arrest a woman without permission of the court under the Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance, 1979.

Legal experts dealing with criminal cases said that police had been adopting various methods so as to offset the positive effects of the procedural changes made in the Criminal Procedure Code by parliament last year.

They said that section 294 PPC was applicable only to acts done in the public, but police were now applying it even to people arrested from their homes.

Except the courts, there is no mechanism for checking the misuse of law by police, said a lawyer of the high court.

Through the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act No 1 of 2005, enacted on Jan 11, 2005, section 156B was inserted in the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) through which it has now been made mandatory on the police that investigation against a woman accused of the offence of fornication or adultery should not be conducted by an officer below the rank of a superintendent of police.

Moreover, for women the offences under the Hudood Ordinance were made non-cognisable and no woman could now be arrested without the permission of the court.

Last week the local police arrested four persons including two women from a guest house in the University Town on charges of committing adultery. As the police had violated the law while arresting the women without permission of the concerned court they registered the FIR under section 294 PPC instead of the Zina Ordinance.

The arrested-persons were granted bail by a local court the next day.

Earlier, in different cases the local courts had granted bail to women in such cases citing the misuse of the law as one of the major reasons for releasing them.

A police official told Dawn that the said amendments were not practicable. “It is practically not possible for us to go and get permission of the court while the accused persons are busy in committing the offence under the Zina Ordinance,” he said.