Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistani lawmakers passed amendments to the country’s rape laws Wednesday, ditching the death penalty for extramarital sex and revising a clause on making victims produce four witnesses to prove rape cases.
Consensual sex outside marriage remains a crime punishable by five years in prison or a $165 fine, said a parliamentary official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
International and local calls for change intensified after the 2002 gang-rape of a woman, Mukhtar Mai, who was assaulted after a tribal council in her eastern Punjab village ordered the rape as punishment for her 13-year-old brother’s alleged affair with a woman of a higher caste.
The amendments enraged Islamic fundamentalists, but won cautious support from human-rights activists, who wanted the controversial laws scrapped altogether.
Pakistan’s late military dictator, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, introduced the laws, known as the Hudood Ordinance, in 1979 to appease Islamic fundamentalist political groups opposed to the secularization of Pakistani society.
