Hina Jilani - Views

Views

"The problem with the cases of honour killings and their non-prosecution lies in the permission that the law grants to the family of the victim to compromise the offence, and that's why the person who actually pulls the trigger walks free... although in the case of honour killing it's mostly a conspiracy between more than one member of the family, and that's the major issue here. I don't think the government wishes to address that issue."

"I always had this feeling that if you see injustice, you have to speak out against it; otherwise you are not in a position to complain."

"It was anger against state-sponsored injustice that forced me to enter courtrooms in the 1970s. For all these years I have retained that outrage so I have been able to fight for human rights and against bonded labour, blasphemy laws..." (Monday, 15 March 1999, in Tribune India)

"The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions."

"There is a real danger of this occurring. The military have an agenda of supporting the extremists and are ideologically very akin to the extremists. It is very important that the world understand how important it is to act in a wise way."

"The United States totally misread the situation. If Musharraf had been successfully countering terrorism, we would not have a situation eight years down the road where (terrorists) actually control territory. Nobody has tried to find the source of the money or the source of the weapons."

"When you put them on trial, you show the wickedness of their crime. Once it becomes abundantly clear that the terrorists' victims are almost entirely comprised of Pakistani civilians, only then will sympathy for their cause be lost. We have to deal with terrorism as a criminal element."

"The civilian government must be supported thoroughly, otherwise we will lose it."

"The administration of justice can be severely hampered if laws emerge from different understandings or perceptions of religion, and their application becomes uneven because of the religious, moral and social beliefs of those administering these laws. Islam and almost all other religions of the world have sectarian and denominational differences. If a national polity is founded on religion, these differences will be manifested in political tensions as well as oppressive restraints on dissent."