ISLAMABAD: On a good day for private lawmaking, women activists in the National Assembly on Tuesday celebrated a bipartisan consensus on a protection bill at the committee level, which they said must also reflect in the whole house when it takes up the draft.
The house also began consideration of another private bill seeking prevention of several anti-women practices after the introduction of three new bills on the third private members’ day of the current session.
As the house received the unanimous report of an 18-member Standing Committee on Women Development recommending adoption of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, which seeks mainly to prevent acid-throwing on women, the bill’s author Marvi Memon of the PML-Q called the consensus of treasury and opposition benches on the issue the “beginning of a new Pakistan”.
Praise for the draft legislation and the committee’s work came also from several other women members from both sides of the house before Acting Speaker Faisal Karim Kundi said the bill, which proposes a minimum of 14 years’ imprisonment and Rs1 million in fine for causing “hurt by corrosive substance”, would automatically be put on the agenda of the next private members’ day, probably in the next session.
“Corrosive substance”, according to an explanation in the bill, “means a substance which may destroy, cause hurt, deface or dismember any organ of the human body and includes every kind of acid, poison, explosive or explosive substance, heating substance, noxious thing, arsenic or any other chemical which has a corroding effect and which is deleterious to human body.”
PML-Q member Donya Aziz initiated a debate on the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices (Criminal Law Amendment) Bill, sponsored by eight party members, but further proceedings were deferred because of the absence of new Law and Justice Minister Maula Bakhsh Chandio.
The bill seeks to prohibit what an attached statement of objects and reasons called “inhuman practices and customs” like depriving women of inheriting property, forced marriages and the so-called “marriage of a woman with the holy Quran” and provides for penal and financial liabilities.
Young PPP member Khurram Jahangir Wattoo won some praise from the chair for his initiative in introducing two bills -- one seeking five years’ imprisonment and a minimum of Rs1 million in fine for encroachments and unauthorised constructions in the Islamabad capital area and the other seeking to bar on government re-employment of retired civil servants and employment of those with dual nationality, and to provide for declaration of assets by civil servants.
Surprisingly, a bill seeking de-weaponisation of Pakistan and standing in the name of 23 MQM members was introduced after Water and Power Minister Naveed Qamar said the government had no objection to it, although a similar MQM bill was withdrawn in the Senate on April 5 after objections from then law and parliamentary affairs minister Babar Awan.
The bill seeks to ban issuance of arms licences, cancellation of existing licences and illicit manufacture of arms.
But it seemed MQM member Abdul Kadir Khanzada, who introduced the bill, was not fully aware of the text of the draft as, while briefly explaining its aims, he spoke of the need to ban only illegal weapons.
Several members from both sides of the house used points of order to air their complaints about issues like prolonged power cuts, law and order and difficulties of wheat growers in selling their produce on government price, before the house was adjourned until 5pm on Wednesday.
The water and power minister acknowledged that loadshedding had aggravated over the “past some days”, particularly in villages, but assured the house that “problems are being solved”.
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