ISLAMABAD, Sept 4: A select committee of the National Assembly on Monday approved the draft of “Protection of Women’s Rights “ bill. PPP Parliamentarians and Fata legislators wrote dissenting notes on various grounds while signing the draft, but announced they would support the bill in the lower house.

The meeting which was chaired by Nasrullah Dareshak was attended by, among others, six ministers and ministers of state, representatives of MQM, Fata and PPP and the attorney general of Pakistan.

Federal Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Dr Sher Afgan Niazi later claimed that the government had succeeded in achieving a consensus on a package of amendments to the bill. Talking to newsmen, Mr Niazi said the government would give sufficient time for debate on the proposed amendments and would get the bill passed during the current session.

Minister for Law and Justice Chaudhry Wasi Zafar rejected arguments that the bill was meant to achieve the objective of modernisation of society in order to please foreign powers and said that an effort had been made to protect women from going to jail without conviction. He claimed that not a single Quranic law had been altered and some laws which had been wrongly included in the “Hudood” laws had been put in the Pakistan Penal Code.

Under the new set of law, he asserted, anyone required for trial under “Tazeer” would be tried under the PPC, instead of Hudood.

PPP Parliamentarians information secretary and member select committee Sherry Rahman said that her party was not satisfied with the amendments but would still support it as a minimum effort towards safeguarding women’s rights. She said that supporting the bill did not mean that her party was supporting the government, but it was meant to be an effort to advance its agenda of giving protection to the womenfolk against undue harassment and coercion.