HR ministry takes solid steps to ensure women’s rights

Islamabad: The Ministry of Human Rights has taken concrete measures for the protection of human rights and showed keen interest especially in non-formal education for adults during last year.

According to available document, the ministry has taken steps for the protection of human rights and assured provision of facilities to women at shelter homes and made solid plans to further provide them technical work skills to make them economically sound.

UNHCR representative appreciated the efforts of Pakistan for hosting the millions of Afghan refugees for the last four decades and providing them support and assistance Pakistan has taken several steps to protect Afghan refugees in the country.

Keeping in view the cross cutting nature of inheritance related issues, coordinated efforts of various social sector federal ministries and provincial departments were ensured to protect woman’s right to inheritance in the country throughout the year.

Efforts were also made by the ministry for social, cultural issues restricting women to get their due share in inherited property and adopted short term and long term measures, including registration of births, deaths and marriages, awareness raising to change the mindset, amendment in laws.

Several actions were proposed including review of laws to identify gaps, establishment of Federal and Provincial Task Forces/ Committees, and awareness raising mechanism besides, a set of questions were also shared with stakeholders for seeking input to come up with possible solutions.

The ministry also planned to make a mechanism with regard to transfer of inheritance to women and started working on inputs to address the bottlenecks and hurdles with possible solutions keeping in view the ground realities.

On deliberations, various proposals and suggestions, the ministry has proposed recommendations including launch of large scale awareness campaign to change the mindset at societal level both in urban and rural areas besides motivation to ensure documentation through registration of births and deaths as well as ‘nikah nama’/Form B, recruitment of female staff at Union Council level, involvement of Women Parliamentary Caucus, and Village Councils at grassroots level. The representative of Council of Islamic Ideology also mentioned their two key recommendations, made in the past like; division of inherited property among the legal heirs as per Islamic law, in case of Hiba; and addition of two columns in death certificate indicating detail of moveable and immoveable property of the deceased and the names of legal heirs.