I understand what you are getting at, but you have to realize thats what she stands for. That doesn't make her enemy of state.
Asma Jahangir (Pakistan)
“…for defending, protecting and promoting human rights in Pakistan and more widely, often in very difficult and complex situations and at great personal risk.”
Asma Jahangir is Pakistan’s leading human rights lawyer. For three decades, she has shown incredible courage in defending the most vulnerable Pakistanis – women, children, religious minorities and the poor. Having founded the first legal aid centre in Pakistan in 1986, Jahangir has courageously taken on very complicated cases and won. For her relentless campaigning against laws that discriminate against women, and for continuously speaking truth to power, Jahangir has been threatened, assaulted in public and placed under house arrest. She made history when she was elected as the first female President of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan in 2010.
Since 1986, Jahangir and her associates at AGHS’ Legal Aid Cell, have taken on several cases involving women, children and bonded labourers. It also established a shelter for women, called ‘Dastak’. Dastak is now an independent trust run jointly by civil society organisations in Pakistan.
In 1996, the Lahore High Court ruled that an adult Muslim woman could not get married without the consent of her male guardian. Women who chose their husbands independently could be forced to annul their marriages and Jahangir, who frequently took on such cases, highlighted the repercussions. She has been able to secure the release from prison of several women accused of adultery or “immoral” sexual behaviour.
In 1999, Jahangir took up the case of Saima Sarwar, who was given shelter at Dastak after leaving her husband and seeking a divorce. Sarwar was subsequently murdered in an act of honour-killing that took place in Jahangir’s offices, highlighting the immense risks involved in taking on these sorts of cases in Pakistan.
In May 2005, Jahangir helped to organise a symbolic mixed-gender marathon in Lahore to raise awareness about violence against sports women by religious extremists. Islamist groups armed with firearms, batons and Molotov cocktails violently opposed the event and Jahangir was publicly beaten, stripped and detained by the police.
More recently, Asma Jahangir was, in November 2007, one of 500 lawyers, opposition politicians and human rights activists detained when President Musharaff declared a state of emergency. She remained under house arrest for three months.
