Legal Reforms and State Policies Affecting Women’s Rights

Abstract

The history of legal reforms and state policies affecting women’s rights and empowerment in Pakistan involves a complex pattern of advances and setbacks, with the state’s efforts to articulate a definition of women’s rights complicated by the need to balance divergent views on the place of women in Pakistani society and in Islam. The state’s location of that discourse within an Islamic framework (at least since the 1970s) has occurred regardless of it being comprised of military or democratic regimes. This chapter focuses on the Pakistan state’s construction of an understanding of what constitutes women’s rights and the contentious debate both within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the political government to define those rights. These actions represent the state’s professed commitment to improve the status, condition, and circumstances of women as well as underscore the persistent challenges to creating a popular vision of women’s rights in Pakistan that all communities find acceptable within Islam.