Islamabad: Pakistan's National Assembly on Wednesday passed a Bill designed to reform the country's harsh rape laws, amid angry protests by the influential alliance of Islamist parties and walk-out by its legislators.
The 342-member lower house of parliament was prorogued after it hurriedly endorsed the Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill.
The Bill still requires approval from the 100-member Senate (upper house), where the government commands comfortable majority.
After the Senate vote expected in the coming days President General Pervez Musharraf will sign the Bill into law.
Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA) religious alliance poured scorn on the Bill calling it unIslamic, while Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said it was totally in line with Islamic injunctions and would help protect rights of women.
The legislation makes changes in the Islamic Hudood laws enforced in 1979 by military ruler Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, under which rape victims are liable to prosection for adultery if they fail to produce four male witnesses to the offence.
International and domestic human rights bodies have been demanding repeal of the Hudood laws, but regards the proposed amendments as a step forward in the right direction. A group of women rights activists rallied outside the parliament while it discussed the legislation.
Ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) president, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, made a dramatic gesture during the assembly session by announcing he would resign if anything in the Bill was proved to be in violation of Islamic tenets.
Shujaat went up to the rostrum and handed his resignation in advance to Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain, who however returned it saying it should be presented if and when warranted in future.
In a bid to pacify the religious right, the government inserted into the Bill a clause that makes lewdness, defined as wilful sexual intercourse, an offence punishable with up to five years' imprisonment and a maximum fine of Rs10,000 (Dh625).
A split over the legislation emerged in the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD), as Pakistan Peoples Party of Benazir Bhutto supported the legislation while PML-N of Nawaz Sharif abstained from the vote.
In between two sittings of the assembly on the day, opposition and ruling coalition leaders held unsuccessful talks in the Speaker's chamber to evolve a consensus.
MMA secretary general Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who is also leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, lashed out at the government at a news conference, accusing it of pushing the country into moral degradation.
He said the enactment would turn Pakistan into a "free-sex state" and warned that the MMA would chalk out a strategy and programme to "resist the move with full force" in consultation with religious scholars and others.
The MMA leadership however indicated it was not in a hurry to carry out its repeated threat to pull out its members from the assemblies in case the Bill was made into a law.
