This never hapapened. It's all a lie

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Not a Victim, but a Hero

After being kidnapped at the age of 16 by a group of thugs and enduring a year of rapes and beatings, Assiya Rafiq was delivered to the police and thought her problems were over.

Then, she said, four police officers took turns raping her.

The next step for Assiya was obvious: She should commit suicide. That?s the customary escape in rural Pakistan for a raped woman, as the only way to cleanse the disgrace to her entire family.

Instead, Assiya summoned the unimaginable courage to go public and fight back. She is seeking to prosecute both her kidnappers and the police, despite threats against her and her younger sisters. This is a kid who left me awed and biting my lip; this isn?t a tale of victimization but of valor, empowerment and uncommon heroism.

?I decided to prosecute because I don?t want the same thing to happen to anybody else,? she said firmly.

Assiya?s case offers a window into the quotidian corruption and injustice endured by impoverished Pakistanis ? leading some to turn to militant Islam.

?When I treat a rape victim, I always advise her not to go to the police,? said Dr. Shershah Syed, the president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan. ?Because if she does, the police might just rape her again.?

Yet Assiya is also a sign that change is coming. She says she was inspired by Mukhtar Mai, a young woman from this remote village of Meerwala who was gang raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council. Mukhtar prosecuted her attackers and used the compensation money to start a school.

But it's all a lie because ciaran says so.

Pakistan?s human rights record has dramatically improved since 1990. The situation of human rights in Pakistan is a complex one, as a result of the country's tremendous diversity, large population, its status as a developing country and a sovereign, Islamic republic as well as a Islamic democracy with a mixture of both Islamic and colonial secular laws. The Constitution of Pakistan provides for fundamental rights, which include freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to bear arms and freedom of the press. Clauses also provide for separation of executive and judiciary, an indepedent judiciary and freedom of movement within the country and abroad.

The founder of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be an "Islamic country without Sharia." No Pakistani Government has ever come up with a detailed conclusion on what he exactly meant by this. Nevertheless, Pakistan's status as an Islamic Republic should not be confused or compared with other Islamic Republics in the region, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike Iran, Pakistan is not a theocracy, but rather an Islamic democracy where elections regularly takes place on time and are mostly free and fair. Most of Pakistan's laws are secular in nature, most of which were inherited from the United Kingdom's colonial rule of modern-day Pakistan before 1947. In recent times, there has been increasing pressure on Pakistan to amend or replace some of its outdated laws made during the time of the British Empire.

Although the government has enacted measures to counter any problems, abuses remain. Furthermore, courts suffer from lack of funds, outside intervention, and deep case backlogs that lead to long trial delays and lengthy pretrial detentions. Many observers inside and outside Pakistan contend that Pakistan?s legal code is largely concerned with crime, national security, and domestic tranquility and less with the protection of individual rights.

The report Freedom in the World 2006 by Freedom House gave Pakistan a political rights rating of 4 (1 representing free and 7 representing not free), and a civil liberties rating of 5, earning it the designation of partly free. However, this designation was received under President Pervez Musharraf. The new government of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani aim to receive the designation of free.

Pakistan is not a country that is under Sharia law (outside of the Swat Valley that is).

ciaran affirms that this kind of thing does not happen in states wherein Sharia is not the law of the land. caran is obviously an expert and knows everything about the Islamic world and it's culture. He must have lived there himself for many years and traveled therein extensively. I'm certain that he speaks Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Dari, Tajik and may other languages and dialects of the region.

Surely the NYT is lying here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Pakistan

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/pakistan/legal-system.htm

It must be those damn crusaders... :wink:

Way to start a locked thread.

:roll: