PESHAWAR: A Pakistani woman on Thursday moved the Peshawar High Court requesting it to declare unconstitutional a provision of the Pakistan Citizenship Act, 1951, which allows citizenship to the foreign wife of a Pakistani man but does not extend the same to the foreign husband of a Pakistani woman.

In the petition, Peshawar resident Sameena Roohi sought the court’s orders for the respondents, including interior ministry and National Database and Registration Authority, to grant citizenship to her Afghan husband, Naseer Mohammad.

She claimed that the law discriminated against the country’s women citizens.

The petitioner requested the court to declare unconstitutional and discriminatory Section 10(2) of the Citizenship Act, under which the wife of a Pakistani resident is entitled to the country’s citizenship but the same is denied to the foreign husband of a Pakistani woman.

Calls Citizenship Act’s relevant provision discriminatory

She sought orders to declare that Section 10(2) of the Citizenship Act was not brought in conformity with the fundamental rights within two years of the commencement of the Constitution, which was a mandatory requirement under Article 8(4) of the Constitution.

The petition is filed through senior lawyer Saifullah Muhib Kakakhel and Mehwish Muhib Kakakhel. The petitioner contended that Section 10(2) of the law was discriminatory and didn’t treat men and women equally.

The respondents in the petition are Nadra through its director-general, interior ministry through its secretary, and directorate-general of immigration and passport through it director general.

The petitioner said she belonged to a respectable family, was married to an Afghan national, Naseer Mohammad, in 1985 and had five children from the marriage and they all were Pakistani nationals.

She said her husband had been working in Kuwait for a long time and he had only been granted Pakistani visa for a short period of one month or so to visit his family.

The woman claimed that her husband had not been given an appointment in Kuwaitforvisa due to Covid-19 pandemic, so he could not visit his family.

She said she had visited the Nadra and immigration offices seeking citizenship for her husband, but was told that Section 10(2) of the law applied only to the foreign wife of a Pakistani man.

The petitioner contended that the Federal Shariat Court had declared in 2008 the impugned provision repugnant to the injunctions of the Holy Quran and Sunnah, and called it discriminatory, against gender equality and a violation of Articles 2(a) and 25 of the Constitution.

She said Pakistan was home to millions of refugees from Afghanistan, who shared the same culture, language, etc. and large number of them had contracted marriages with Pakistanis especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, but only the spouses of men are granted nationality of Pakistan and Pakistani women were deprived of the same.

The petitioner also referred to several international conventions, to which Pakistan was signatory including Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and said by not amending the Citizenship Act, the government had been violating all those international laws, which declared that there should be no discrimination on basis of gender.

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2021