POLICE ABUSE OF WOMEN IN PAKISTAN
In Pakistan, more than 70 percent of women in police custody experience physical abuse, including sexual abuse, at the hands of their jailers, according to local human rights lawyers.19 Reported abuses include beating and slapping; suspension in mid-air by hands tied behind the victim's back; the insertion of foreign objects, including police batons and chili peppers, into the vagina and rectum; and gang rape. Yet despite these alarming reports, police officers almost never suffer criminal penalties for such abuse, even in cases in which incontrovertible evidence of custodial rape exists.20 One senior police official told a delegation of local human rights activists that "in 95 percent of the cases the women themselves are at fault."21
This attitude is reflected in the way police handle allegations of rape brought by the victims. Police routinely refuse to register such complaints, particularly if they implicate a fellow officer. Police officers also illegally detain women in a police lockup for days at a time without formally registering a charge against them or producing them before a magistrate within the required 24-hour period. Women thus can be held indefinitely without the knowledge of the courts. It is during these periods of "invisibility" that most sexual abuse of female detainees occurs.
Many of the women detained in Pakistan should not be in custody in the first place. Between 50 and 80 percent of all female detainees in Pakistan are imprisoned under the Islamic Hudood Ordinances, penal laws introduced in 1979, which in law and in practice discriminate against women. Prior to thepassage of the Hudood Ordinances, women were not directly involved with the criminal justice system in any significant number; since their introduction, thousands of women have been imprisoned under these laws alone. The steep rise in the number of female prisoners in turn increased the opportunity for police misconduct toward women.
The Hudood Ordinances criminalize, among other things, adultery, fornication and rape, and prescribe punishments for these offenses that include stoning to death, public flogging and amputation. Human Rights Watch does not object to laws founded on religion, provided that human rights are respected and the principle of equality before the law is upheld. However, the Hudood laws, as written and applied, clearly conflict with these rights and principles. Not only do they prescribe punishments that are cruel and inhuman under international law, but they clearly discriminate on the basis of gender.22 The laws also conflict with the Pakistani Constitution, which guarantees the right to equality and non-discrimination on the basis of gender.
19 The following material was adapted from the Women's Rights Project and Asia Watch, Double Jeopardy: Police Abuse of Women in Pakistan (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992). See also Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, The Hudood Ordinances: A Divine Sanction? (Lahore: Rhotac Books, 1990), p. 137.
20 Human Rights Watch investigated police abuse of women in Pakistan during a mission in October 1992. The Human Rights Watch team interviewed victims of custodial rape and other abuse, lawyers, activists and police and government officials. In Lahore, Human Rights Watch interviewed Deputy Inspector General Maqbool, who told us that to his knowledge "not a single officer had been convicted" of custodial rape.
21 Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Newsletter, October 1991, p. 7.
22 The Hudood Ordinances have also been shown to discriminate on the basis of religion, but this issue falls outside the purview of this report.
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