To honour is...to love and protect!


15 years old Ambreen was dragged from her home, injected with sedatives, strangled with ropes, tied up in a van and then burned while still alive.

Her crime: Helping her school friend flee the village to marry of her own free will.

The ‘honour killing’ was ordered by a tribal jirga, including some family members of the eloped girl, who then carried out the killing.



This is not the first time such a heinous crime is committed against a woman on the order of the tribal council. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, over a thousand women were killed in Pakistan last year in the name of so called 'honour killing.'

Pakistan is currently ranked 147th out of 188 countries on the UN Gender Equality Index. We all are seeing, since the passage of the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Bill recently, more than 30 religious groups have spoken out against the bill, calling campaigning in favour of the bill as promotion of obscenity and the destruction of the family system. The bill offers a bare minimum protection for women from crimes of physical, financial and psychological abuse, among latest reports that 70 to 90 percent Pakistani women have suffered some kind of abuse at least once in their lives.

The criminal justice system is completely not working very effectively. There has been a complete failure of the state and the society to deal with such premeditated crimes.

Ambreen's father, a poor local labourer from Abbottabad, said his daughter had just quit school at grade eight.

It’s not only a cold-blooded murder, it’s savagely barbaric.

Bushra
2105 hours
Saturday 7 May 2016