WHILE almost the entire world, including Pakistan, is frenetically engaged in enhancing women’s rights and empowerment, the SECP has recently decided to bar women witnesses on shareholding documents. While women can hold shares of the various corporate companies registered on the stock market, they cannot serve as witnesses on transfer deeds, indemnity bonds and other documents related to share certificates.

This, I feel, is an anomaly, perhaps reflecting an extension or belated fallout of the infamous Hadood ordinance. For the past three years some share registrars had enforced this ban, but, for now, this has become universal and the share-related documents are returned unprocessed if they bear women as a witness.

I am rather amazed that despite the plethora of women’s rights organisations, no one has taken note of this recent stab in the back of extant women’s rights.

This ban has put all female families and single male families to great inconvenience since they have to lookout for male acquaintances to bear witness to their documents, causing undue delays in submitting their share documents for registration etc.

Is this the foretaste of a just society the government has been proclaiming to be in pursuit of for quite sometime. In any case I would request women’s rights organisations, as also the relevant government functionaries, to take notice of this backward step to gender equality.

Prof Sharif al Mujahid

Karachi

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2015

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