Charging Rape, Facing Prison

By Hannah Bloch

When a young, illiterate housewife named Zafran Bibi went to Pakistani police last year, pregnant and claiming a fellow villager had raped her, she didn't expect that she'd be the one punished. But a judge in the ultraconservative Northwest Frontier province exonerated the man and last month convicted Zafran Bibi of adultery. Her sentence: death by public stoning. In Pakistan, victims of sex crimes are subject to harsh Islamic laws known as the Hudood ordinances. For a rapist to be found guilty, four adult male Muslims have to witness the crime, or the rapist must confess. If the court rules there was consent, the woman can be convicted of adultery, as Zafran Bibi was. Although no stoning sentence has ever been carried out, human-rights activists say that women's lives are ruined by the shame and long years in prison. At least half of all women in Pakistani prisons are there under the Hudood laws.

Zafran Bibi's case is especially complex. Her husband Naimat Khan, who until last year was in jail on a murder charge, claims that his own father forced Zafran Bibi to make the rape accusation against a man with whom the father was feuding. Later she changed her story and accused her brother-in-law, who was never charged. Khan says his wife actually became pregnant after a conjugal visit to him in jail. "It will be justice if my wife is handed back to me," says Khan.

President Pervez Musharraf says that he has no plans to do away with the Hudood laws. Tampering with them would enrage the religious conservatives. But two weeks ago, after Musharraf promised the death sentence would not be carried out, a Peshawar court temporarily suspended Zafran Bibi's death sentence and is considering her appeal. For human-rights activists, the reprieve doesn't go far enough. "As long as such laws are on the books, people will suffer," says Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. --By Hannah Bloch