Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PMLN) plans to pass long-delayed legislation against “honor killings” within weeks in the wake of the high-profile murder of an outspoken social media star, the daughter of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said on Wednesday.
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The proposed bills could seek to close a loophole that allows those who kill in the name of honor – usually a relative of the victim – to evade punishment by seeking clemency from other family members.
She added that the government wanted to pass the law unanimously, and are negotiating with religious parties in parliament.
A man was tortured to death in Pakistan over an affair with a married woman, police said Tuesday, a rare case of a male falling victim to an “honor killing”.
In Facebook posts, Baloch, 26, spoke of trying to change “the typical orthodox mindset” of people in Pakistan.
Her social media posts included a series of selfies with a prominent cleric, Abdul Qavi, who was subsequently suspended from a prominent Muslim council.
Amnesty International (AI) has recently urged authorities in Pakistan to stop pardoning the perpetrators of honour killing and violence against women.
Waseem Baloch murdered his sister Qandeel Baloch by strangling her at their family home in the city of Multan in Punjab Province in Pakistani for the “kind of pictures she had been posting online”. Others hailed her as a “feminist icon”.
“The death of Qandeel Baloch conveys an insidious message: that women will be kept back at all cost; murdered, if they dare nurture ambitions to break the glass ceiling”, the English daily Dawn newspaper wrote in an editorial on Sunday.
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The influential Council of Islamic Ideology, which advises the government on the compatibility of laws with Islam, warned that it would not support any law that removed the forgiveness loophole, even though the council considers honour killings a crime.
