In a remote clearing near Quetta, Balochistan, two lives were extinguished by bullets, their final moments captured on camera and circulated across the country.
The woman, Bano Bibi, clutched a Quran and calmly requested her executioner to walk seven symbolic steps with her before he shot her. Her partner, Ehsan Ullah, was murdered alongside her. The precise reasons for their execution remain unclear, though a tribal council/jirga reportedly sanctioned it. Their punishment: a public execution sanctioned by a jirga, performed with theatrical cruelty and shared as a warning.
This was no isolated incident. It was the latest manifestation of a system where law exists in ink but not in action and where justice is measured by visibility rather than principle. It was the continuation of a long-standing pact between the state and tribal patriarchies, one that trades women’s lives for political convenience.
Despite Pakistan’s constitutional framework and international obligations, honour killings remain deeply entrenched. In 2024 alone, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) recorded at least 405 such murders. Civil society groups estimate the real figure is far higher. Most victims are women, and the perpetrators are often close relatives, acting with impunity. In rare cases where investigations are initiated, convictions are almost non-existent. According to UNFPA data, conviction rates in gender-based violence cases remain between 1.0 and 2.5 per cent.
Balochistan is no stranger to this phenomenon. It has laws on paper – the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act of 2014, among them – but enforcement is virtually absent. Tribal jirgas, outlawed by the Supreme Court in 2019 for being incompatible with Pakistan’s constitutional and international human rights obligations, continue to function as parallel courts. Their decisions are rarely challenged and when they order death, the state looks away.
The recent killings in Margat were orchestrated within this extra-legal framework. A jirga deemed the couple guilty of an ‘immoral relationship’ and issued a death decree. The state did not intervene until the video of the executions went viral. Thirteen suspects were subsequently arrested. Yet, in the absence of institutional safeguards, there is little reason to believe that justice will follow.
What unfolded in Balochistan is part of a broader national pattern. Across Pakistan, honour is treated as a collective weapon. Women are reduced to being repositories of familial pride. Their decisions – whom to marry, how to dress, when to speak – are subject to male approval. Any assertion of autonomy is met with punishment, often lethal. From Farzana Parveen, stoned outside the Lahore High Court in 2014, to Qandeel Baloch, strangled by her brother in 2016, the country’s landscape is littered with the graves of women who dared to choose.
The 2016 Criminal Law Amendment, which removed the loophole allowing families to forgive killers in honour cases, was heralded as transformative. Yet, the outcomes have not matched the promises. Trials are routinely delayed, evidence is poorly handled and witnesses withdraw under pressure. In cases like Kohistan, where girls were murdered over a video, convictions were eventually secured only to be overturned for lack of evidence.
The persistence of jirgas illustrates the state’s abdication. These councils, steeped in patriarchal custom, remain influential, particularly in underdeveloped and marginalised regions. Their verdicts carry social legitimacy, if not legal authority. More troublingly, the state often relies on them to maintain local order. Tribal elders double as legislators, their authority reinforced rather than curtailed. In such a structure, rule of law becomes a performance enacted only when global or domestic scrutiny demands it.
Honour killings flourish because the state permits them to. Women are not murdered solely by their fathers or brothers. They are murdered by a society that elevates male honour above female life, by a judiciary that delays and dithers, by a police force that classifies murder as a ‘domestic issue’ and by legislators who sit in silence.
Accountability cannot wait for outrage to trend. Structural reform requires the criminalisation of jirgas in both letter and practice. All honour-related killings must be treated as premeditated murder. The state must assume the role of primary complainant in every case. Survivors and witnesses must be given institutional protection. And a nationwide programme to dismantle tribal adjudication of criminal matters must be undertaken with political will.
Pakistan’s crisis is not merely one of justice delayed. It is justice denied through silence, complicity and selective enforcement. Until women are treated as equal citizens, protected not by luck or virality but by law and institutions, the cycle will persist.
The killings in Margat were filmed for a reason. They were meant to send a message. If the state remains unresponsive, it will have answered that message with its silence.
The writer is a freelance contributor.
