KARACHI – A court in southeastern Pakistan has sentenced a man who refused to accept his daughter while accusing his former wife of adultery to 80 lashes.
During the hearing, Additional District and Sessions Judge (Malir) Shahnaz Bohio convicted Fareed Qadir under the Hudood Ordinance 1979, Section 7(1), for defamation.
The defamation ordinance states that “any person who commits defamation shall be liable to 80 lashes.”
During the proceedings, the husband submitted two applications in the Karachi court — one requesting a DNA test for the baby girl, and the other one seeking to disown his daughter. However, these applications were later withdrawn by him.
“It is crystal clear that the accused is a liar and had fabricated an allegation of Qazaf upon the complainant regarding illegitimacy of her daughter… Thus, he is convicted and sentenced to 80 stripes each under section 7(1) of the Qazaf Ordinance, 1979,” the judge stated in her verdict, as reported by Dawn.
What is Qazaf?
Qazaf means to wrongfully accuse a chaste Muslim man or chaste Muslim woman of adultery or homosexuality.
The case stemmed from a complaint by the Fareed Qadir’s former wife, who stated that they got married in February 2015 and lived together for only a month. In December 2015, she gave birth to a girl but her ex-husband failed to provide for the child or take her back to his home.
The court in Sindh capital accepted the woman’s plea and ordered the accused to provide maintenance for his daughter and former wife.
However, in the next proceedings, the man out rightly denied it was his child while claiming that the couple were together for only six hours after their marriage and then his ex-wife left him — never to be returned.
But the court noted that the accused neither took an oath nor presented any witnesses to support his claims. The court also noted that the accused had confessed in his statement under Section 342 of the Pakistan Penal Code that the child was indeed his legitimate daughter.
Hence, the court convicted him of making false allegations and ordered a sentence of 80 lashes.
According to the ruling, since the accused is only facing punishment by lashes, he will stay out on bail but he must show up at the specified time and location set by the court to receive the lashes.
Moreover, the court directed the accused to furnish a surety bond of Rs0.1 million.
Flogging (Corporal Punishment) in Pakistan
The rare judgment comes as the first such punishment to be given in decades. Press reports indicate that two men were administered 30 strokes each as part of their punishment for the rape of a six-year-old girl in August 1991. They were also each sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.
Corporal punishment, including whipping, was widely used in the past in the Indian subcontinent during the British colonial period. The Pakistan Penal Code of 1860 (PPC) and the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 (CCP) both date from the British colonial period and are based on the common law.
Whipping or flogging is provided in the Pakistan Penal Code as a punishment for a variety of offenses mostly related to theft and punishment for major offenses against the rules.
This punishment was also introduced under a number of martial law regulations after the military takeover of General, later President, Zia-ul-Haq in 1977. It was inflicted in the martial law period (1977 to 1985) on both political and criminal prisoners, sometimes in public.