It is not the Supreme Court (SC), jurists say, but the weak prosecution system of the country that has disappointed gang-rape victim Mukhtaran Mai and the international community with the acquittal of all but one of the accused, as judges badly lacked solid evidence in the case to give justice to the woman in her appeal against the Lahore High Court (LHC) verdict.
Several unanswered questions about the SC judgement have divided jurists and many of them saw the judgment as “half justice” and “half injustice”.
They say that the victim could not get complete justice from the SC because of an undue 5-year delay in the judgement, which kept her on toes, only to be turned away once again.
If Mai was really gang-raped, what justice did she get from the court, they question. The SC found the prosecution’s case to be weak and Mai’s appeal bore no fruit.
“Had there been a strong prosecution department and some reliable system to gather evidence operative in the country, the judgement of the Supreme Court in the appeal would have been altogether different and astonishing for the world as well as the alleged rapists,” jurists told Pakistan Today on Friday.
Senior lawyers said in the face of the allegedly faulty evidence and incomplete judicial file of the case, the SC judges, like judges of the LHC, had “no better option than this order of acquittal”, as judges were bound by law to work on solid evidence in the larger interest of justice, instead of acting on personal whims or personal opinions any case.
Judicial Activism Penal Chairman Muhammad Azhar Siddique said courts could not provide complete justice in rape cases unless there were special laws for such cases, and separate prosecution departments for rape investigations with state-of-the-art equipment for evidence collection, as police currently had no knowledge or tools of gathering the required evidence in such cases.
Siddique said parliament should pass special laws to set up separate courts and special prosecution departments in the country to provide justice to victims of rape. He said if these steps were taken then the wrongly accused would also get justice.
“We should not forget the fact that the Supreme Court cannot do anything in a case where solid evidence has not come on the record for some reason,” said jurists.
They said further that DNA tests were not conducted at the right time and the first information report of the case was also registered a week after the alleged gang-rape, which made the case a little suspicious in the eyes of the law.
Lawyer Sardar Khurram Latif Khosa told Pakistan today that the SC had provided complete justice in the case in light of the available evidence, because the law did not sentence any accused until there was solid evidence against them.
He said, however, that the SC had delayed justice by keeping the accused in jail for 5 years because after it took an “unnecessary” suo motu notice of the case following a verdict by the LHC.
Mai was allegedly gang-raped in June 2002 on the orders of a panchayat (village council) in Meerwala town of Punjab, as punishment after her younger brother was wrongly accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan. The boy was 12-years-old at the time.
