KARACHI: Married as a child and wrongly imprisoned for nearly 20 years over the murder of her husband, Rani Bibi is now free and fighting for compensation in a test case for thousands of other false convictions.

Bibi was only 13 when police arrested her for killing her husband whom she remembers “as a good man”.

Her parents and her brother were also arrested and jailed as they all were the last people to be seen with her husband when the couple was visiting her family’s home.

But his body — with a head injury from a blunt weapon — was found buried at his own residence some 40km away, according to court documents.

She spent the next 19 years toiling in prison for a crime she did not commit, cooking for hundreds of inmates and sweeping endless floors and ground-keeping in the scorching heat.

In 2017, LHC freed Rani and apologised, saying it ‘feels helpless in compensating her’

“I did hard labour,” Bibi, 35, told Reuters by phone from Midranjha village in Punjab.

She was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 and then followed a series of errors that left her locked up.

A prison superintendent failed to file her appeal to the high court several times and Bibi was left without a state counsel to represent her and was unable to afford a private one.

It was only in 2014 that her appeal was taken up after a lawyer, who headed a local charity, met Bibi on a routine prison visit and fought for her release.

In 2017, the Lahore High Court released her over a lack of evidence and apologised, saying she was “left to languish in the jail solely due to (the) lacklustre attitude of the jail authorities”.

“This court feels helpless in compensating her,” the judge said in his order at the time.

But her release signalled the start of a new battle.

Pakistan is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — a treaty adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 that guarantees the right to compensation for victims of wrongful convictions. But the country has not yet incorporated the terms into local laws.

Bibi and her lawyers are now determined to change that.

In March, the Foundation for Funda­mental Rights (FFR), a legal advocacy group working for Bibi, filed a petition to demand the Punjab government pay compensation for the “miscarriage of justice”.

They also asked the government to create new legislation to act against wrongful convictions in Pakistan, where there are likely thousands of cases like Bibi’s, according to FFR.

In a 2019 report, the group highlighted that in 310 capital punishment cases heard by the Supreme Court between 2010 and 2018, nearly two in five prisoners on death row were wrongfully convicted.

While Bibi has not asked for any specific amount, she said she hoped the compensation would help her buy a new bed, blankets and linen, a washing machine, an iron and a stove.

“I didn’t know I could claim something or how much it should be, but I hope they can just give me enough so I can buy things for my home,” she said. “I have nothing right now.” Bibi has tried to rebuild her life after walking free. She found jobs as a domestic help and remarried four months ago.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2020