Child bride wrongly jailed for murder seeks justice

karachi — Married as a child and wrongly imprisoned for nearly 20 years over the murder of her husband in Punjab province, Rani Bibi is now free and fighting for compensation in a test case for thousands of other false convictions.

Bibi was only 13 when police arrested her for killing her husband whom she remembers “as a good man”.

Her parents and her brother were also arrested and jailed as they all were the last people to be seen with her husband when the couple was visiting her family’s home.

She spent the next 19 years toiling in prison for a crime she did not commit, cooking for hundreds of inmates and sweeping endless floors and groundkeeping in the scorching heat.

“I did hard labour,” Bibi, 35, told the

Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Midranjha village in Punjab.

Bibi was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 — and then followed a series of errors that left her locked up.

A prison superintendent failed to file her appeal to the high court several times and Bibi was left without a state counsel to represent her and was unable to afford a private one.

It was only in 2014 that her appeal was taken up after a lawyer, who headed a local charity, met Bibi on a routine prison visit and fought for her release.

In 2017, the Lahore high court released her over a lack of evidence and apologised, saying she was “left to anguish in the jail solely due to (the) lacklustre attitude of the jail authorities”.

But her release signalled the start of a new battle. Pakistan is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — a treaty that guarantees the right to compensation for victims of wrongful convictions.

But Pakistan has not yet incorporated the terms into local laws.

Bibi and her lawyers are now determined to change that.

In March, the Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), a legal advocacy group working for Bibi, filed a petition to demand the Punjab government pay compensation for the “miscarriage of justice”. They also asked the government to create new legislation to act against wrongful convictions in Pakistan, where there are likely thousands of cases like Bibi’s, according to FFR. —