Pakistan's parliament voted yesterday in favour of making it easier for rape victims to seek redress by curbing Islamic laws that discriminate harshly against women, an issue that has been at the forefront of the struggle between moderate and fundamentalist forces in the country.
Under pressure from the West to curb extremism, President Pervez Musharraf went on national television to praise changes he said would protect women. And he criticized religious conservative opponents.
"The time has come for moderate elements in Pakistan to come forward and show their real force to these extremists and tell the extremists they will have no more say in Pakistan," he said.
There is ample evidence that Pakistani women, particularly the poor and illiterate, need protection.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has estimated that there is a rape in the country every two hours and a gang rape every eight hours.
Some Islamist parliamentarians stormed out of the National Assembly, saying the bill's amendments to the notorious Hudood Ordinances violated the Koran and would "turn Pakistan into a free-sex society."
But Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said that the Women's Protection Bill conforms to Islamic teachings and "will give rights to women and help end excesses against them," once it receives senate approval and is enacted into law.
Not quite, say Pakistan's human-rights campaigners and international organizations such as Human Rights Watch, which complain the bill does not go far enough to end discrimination against women who are sexually assaulted and to give them equal rights in court.
"The government has made some positive changes by passing this bill," said Hina Jillani, of Pakistan's human-rights commission, "but it does not meet our demands."
Her comments were echoed by Ali Dayan Hasan, South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "The Hudood Ordinances are hopelessly flawed and should be repealed, but this bill will provide at least modest relief to victims."
The Hudood Ordinances, enacted by military ruler Zia ul-Haq in 1979, criminalize adultery and non-marital consensual sex. They also make a rape victim liable to prosecution for adultery if she cannot produce four male witnesses to the assault, an almost impossible burden of proof.
Under the ordinances, women have been routinely jailed for adultery on flimsy evidence, often when a former husband refused to recognize a divorce, and the legislation led to thousands of women being imprisoned for so-called honour crimes.
Pakistan's treatment of women exploded into the open with international publicity about 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.
Under the changes, as described by Reuters and Associated Press, judges would be allowed to try rape cases in criminal rather than Islamic courts. That would do away with the need for male witnesses and would allow convictions to be made on the basis of forensic and circumstantial evidence.
The bill, however, still criminalizes premarital sex, described as "willful sexual intercourse" between a man and a woman who are not married, which would be punishable by five years in prison.
The bill would also outlaw statutory rape, sex with girls under the age of 16. The Islamic code bans sex with girls before puberty.
Opposition members of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's more liberal Pakistan People's Party supported the bill, even though they said it does not go far enough.
"It's something that's partial. It's halfway," said Sherry Rehman, a senior member of the People's Party. "We would have liked to see a total repeal of these anti-women and discriminatory laws."