Fearless Pakistani fighter for human rights
Asma Jahangir, lawyer: b Lahore, January 27, 1952; m Tahir Jahangir; 2d, 1s; d Lahore, February 11, 2018, aged 66.
Asma Jahangir was described as ‘‘the gutsiest woman in Pakistan’’. Just 5ft tall (1.5m) and bespectacled, she berated barrelchested generals and criticised the mullahs of the Taliban.
Yet her record as a towering champion of human rights stemmed from a dose of post-baby blues. Depressed and piling on the pounds after the birth of her second child, Jahangir felt like ‘‘just a little, out-of-shape mummy’’. Life, she decided, was too brief to remain a sidekick for others. So she invited her sister, Hina, and a few friends for lunch.
The result was the founding of Pakistan’s first all-women law firm. It was February 1980 and, after the novelty of dealing with women lawyers had faded in the Pakistan courts, Jahangir encountered great difficulties as she challenged the new legislation on rape, fornication and blasphemy introduced by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
Jahangir and her sister led the first protests against Zia-ul-Haq’s Hudood ordinances – or Islamisation of the law – after a chance meeting with a blind
13-year-old who was jailed for fornication after becoming pregnant when she was raped by her employers. The girl’s case was later overturned; Jahangir also fought decrees ruling that any woman reporting a rape was adulterous unless she could produce four Muslim men as witnesses.
Overnight the legal cases that the advocate-general had been passing to Jahangir dried up. She was later arrested and tried by a military court. ‘‘Women’s rights was thought of as a western concept,’’ she recalled in 2014. ‘‘Now people do talk about women’s rights – political parties talk about it, even religious parties talk about it.’’
This, however, was merely one of many legal victories gained as a result of Jahangir’s lobbying. A list of 400 disappeared people in Pakistan was reduced to 97 thanks to her campaigns. She secured the release of bonded labourers owing debts to their employers worth thousands of rupees. Why, judges asked, was Jahangir bringing ‘‘those people who stank’’ to court? ‘‘You are here precisely for them,’’ she snapped. She had a line in sharp quips and assertive putdowns.
Her courage won her international plaudits – in 2005 she was nominated for the Nobel peace prize – but she was reviled as much as adored in Pakistan.
Who else could draw lawyers to the streets urging the withdrawal of her licence to practise? Who else could provoke such torrents of abuse from journalists convinced she was a traitor, in American pay or out to destroy Pakistan’s Islamic values?
In 2012 she accused the country’s intelligence services of plotting to murder her.
Little, if anything, frightened Jahangir, even the mob who smashed up her car after the High Court had acquitted a 14-year-old Christian who she had defended against charges of blasphemy.
Cheerful and resilient, she returned home after a spell in prison, relaying this as such a thrilling adventure that her daughter begged to join her the next time she was jailed.
Asma Jilani was born in Lahore, the daughter of Malik Jilani, a civil servant who entered politics on retirement. His outspoken views on Pakistan’s military leaders led to his frequent arrest and imprisonment. When the family lands were confiscated, Asma’s mother, Sabiha, started a clothing business.
By the time she was 18, Asma thought of the courts, she observed wryly, ‘‘as simply a place you dressed up to meet your father’’. When he sent a note home listing the possible grounds on which he might be released, Asma brought the petition to the High Court of Lahore.There it was dismissed, so she brought the case to Pakistan’s Supreme Court.
A sense of vocation as a lawyer blossomed as Asma took the special seat reserved for the petitioner and admired the arguments made by her father’s barrister, who was Pakistan’s former foreign minister. But she also saw ‘‘the manipulation behind the scenes – how cases are won and lost’’. In 1971 the administration of President Yahya Khan ended and Pakistan’s Supreme Court freed her father soon after.
Asma would trace her campaigning skill to her schooldays at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Lahore. Usually the nuns chose the head girl, but Asma insisted there should be an election for the post. The custom is maintained to this day.
In 1978 she married Tahir Jahangir, a businessman living next door, and obtained a bachelor of laws degree from the university of Punjab. This was not simple, given that the law college banned married women from lectures. Jahangir convinced a friend to pass on her lecture notes.
Once qualified, she chipped away at Tahir’s resistance to her working as a lawyer, negotiating her freedom to practise. With Hina she founded a pressure group, the Women’s Action Forum. When she was arrested and sent to prison Jahangir feared that she had pushed her husband too far. As she was freed, Tahir awaited her at the prison gates, much to her relief. They agreed that he would never listen to her speeches nor meddle in her protests and she would never read his newspaper columns on nature. He trekked alone on regular journeys to the mountains.
They had three children. Munizae, the eldest, is a journalist who has worked as a correspondent for New Delhi Television and started her own chat show on Express Television. She is the co-founder of South Asian Women in Media. Sulema is a solicitor in England who specialises in domestic and international family law. Their brother, Jillani, works with his father, running the family company that makes towels and bathrobes in Lahore. All three children were sent to boarding school in England because their mother worried that they might be kidnapped after she and Hina cofounded the first centre in Pakistan offering free legal aid.
In 1987 she also co-founded the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, later serving as its chairwoman. She fought for many of her poorest clients without charging a penny.
An accusation that she had broken Pakistan’s blasphemy laws was dismissed when Jahangir produced a tape recording of the meeting. Death threats did not frighten her, but on one occasion would-be assassins stumbled by mistake into her mother’s house next door, briefly holding her mother, brother, sister-in-law and their children at gunpoint. She was placed under house arrest in
2007 for opposing the removal of Pakistan’s chief justice. She sent an email to a friend and colleague in which she said the president, General Musharraf, had ‘‘lost his marbles’’.
In 2010 she became the first woman president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. Yet although she smoked hand-rolled mini-cigarettes in the bar room, and her direct gaze and frank speech startled the conventional, Jahangir invariably wore the traditional shalwar kameez, urging her daughters to follow suit. Her daughter Munizae sighed: ‘‘She’s a typical Punjab mum who is never happy with how my sister keeps her house or is bringing up her kid.’’
Relentlessly energetic, Jahangir once organised a marathon in Lahore to lobby against a government ban on women participating in races. The police attacked the runners, ripping open the back of Jahangir’s shirt. By the time she reached the police station, she had not only managed to find safety pins to secure the rips, but was leading a protest with vigorous shouts.
Constantly alert to injustice, she once stopped a passing clerk over lunch in a restaurant to say: ‘‘You know I’ve been coming here for years yet we still don’t have a women’s toilet.’’
She was a special rapporteur for the UN, reporting on human rights in Iran and on religious freedom – in which capacity she once called for the disestablishment of the Church of England. Such activism attracted international recognition. France made Jahangir an officer of the Legion d’Honneur, while Sweden gave her a human rights prize.
If some in Pakistan still vilify the name of Asma Jahangir, many lament the passing of a woman of courage, echoing the sentiments of Malala Yousafzai, whom she had met the week before she died. The
20-year-old Nobel prizewinner tweeted: ‘‘Heartbroken that we lost Asma Jahangir – a saviour of democracy and human rights.’’ – The Times
Jahangir was a special rapporteur for the UN, reporting on human rights in Iran and on religious freedom – in which capacity she once called for the disestablishment of the Church of England.