PESHAWAR, Nov 7: The Peshawar High Court on Wednesday rejected a bill against ‘ghag’, observing that the nominal penalties mentioned in the proposed law would not prove to be a deterrent against the centuries-old inhuman custom under which a man could claim the right to marry a woman of his choice.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dost Mohammad Khan and Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth directed the relevant department along with the law department to send senior most official not below the office of the secretary to hold a meeting with the high court’s registrar and the director general of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Judicial Academy (KPJA) to reshape the bill in line with the need of the society.

It ordered the review of the bill before tabling it before the provincial assembly, and adjourned the hearing until the third week of December.

The bench was hearing two identical writ petitions, which challenged the custom of ‘ghag’.

At the outset of the hearing, the chief justice asked standing counsel for the federal government Jamil Warsak if he had received directives from the attorney general for Pakistan as earlier notice was issued to him. He replied in negative. However, additional advocate general Ubaid Razaq produced the draft of the bill.

When the bench went through the draft, it expressed several reservations about it.

The chief justice observed that instead of introducing stringent penalties for the inhuman practice of ‘ghag’, the government had proposed nominal penalties, including the maximum sentence of seven years imprisonment and the minimum of three years imprisonment.

The chief justice observed that the sentence should be enhanced so that the accused in such like cases should not get benefit and will not be entitled to be freed on bail under the Code of Criminal Procedure. He observed that it was inhuman that a man would make a call outside the house of a woman following which she could not be married to someone else in the same area.

The chief justice proposed to the government representatives that if they were not having proper law drafting persons the registrar of the high court and the KPJA director general would help them improve the draft of the proposed law.

One of these two petitions is filed by father of two minor girls, Mohammad Nawaz, who alleged that a jirga comprising some members of local peace committee had ordered him to make payment of Rs275,000 to his two nephews because he had denied marrying his daughters to them under the custom of ‘ghag’.

The other human rights petition is filed by Shabana Akhtar, who challenged a decision allegedly made by a local jirga around a decade ago whereby under the custom of ‘ghag’, her father was restrained from marrying her to anyone in her family and village.

Essa Khan and Akbar Shah, lawyers for the petitioners, said the custom of ‘ghag’ was inhuman and couldn’t be tolerated in a civilised society.

In June this year, the high court had directed the federal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governments to enact a law for declaring the custom a penal offence.

In July, the provincial government had produced the rough draft of the bill but the court had directed it to further improve it.

In the proposed draft, the provincial law department had recommending amendments to Pakistan Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure. — Bureau Report