ISLAMABAD: Amid calls for stern punishment to people involved in the so-called honour killings after the murder of model Qandeel Baloch, a special parliamentary committee is scheduled to meet on Thursday to take up two pro-women bills that were adopted by the Senate but lapsed due to government failure to get them passed from the National Assembly within the stipulated time.

The committee, headed by Law Minister Zahid Hamid, had to defer consideration of the anti-honour killing and anti-rape bills at a meeting on March 29 after opposition from religious parties, particularly Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (Fazl).

The 10-member bipartisan Committee of the Joint Sitting on Bills had been constituted by National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq to review the drafts of six bills, including the controversial PIA conversion bill, which was later passed with consensus after the government agreed to include in it amendments suggested by the opposition.

Raising objections to the two bills, JUI-F Senator Maulana Ataur Rehman, who is the brother of the party chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, had said some clauses of the bills were in conflict with religious tenets and called for referring the two drafts to the Council of Islamic Ideology to seek its opinion.

The Anti-Honour Killings Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill 2015 and the Anti-Rape Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill 2015, initially piloted by former senator of the Pakistan People’s Party Sughra Imam as private members’ bills, were passed by the Senate some two years ago.

But the government failed to get the bills passed by the National Assembly within the stipulated 90 days and consequently had to bring them on the agenda of a joint sitting of parliament, which had actually been planned to get the PIA conversion bill passed.

The first bill aims at preventing killing of women in the name of honour by making the crime a non-compoundable offence and the other seeks to make DNA test a compulsory part of procedure in investigation into rape cases.

Defending the bills in the committee’s meeting, PPP’s Farhatullah Babar had said that murders in the name of honour had largely gone unpunished because in most cases both the accused and the victim had the same guardian (wali) who promptly pardoned the accused. The bill, he said, sought to remove a major lacuna in the law by making honour killing a non-compoundable offence.

Meanwhile, condemning the murder of Qandeel Baloch, PPP Co-Chairman Asif Zardari has called for early adoption of the law against honour killing.

“Every time a woman is murdered in the name of honour, the state looks the other way,” he said in a statement issued by the party’s media office here on Sunday.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2016