'Jury' ordered rape of Pakistani teenager

A tribal council ordered four men to gang-rape an 18-year-old woman to punish her family, after her 11-year-old brother was seen walking with a girl from a higher tribal caste.

Police raided the central Punjabi village of Meerwala yesterday and arrested six people, including the rapists and witnesses, a district police officer, Farman Ali, said.

The victim, who has not been identified, had been chosen by a panchyat, or tribal jury, which threatened all of the women in the family with rape unless she submitted herself to the punishment.

The verdict was handed down after tribal elders decided her brother, a Gujar, warranted severe punishment because walking unchaperoned with a girl from the Mastoi tribe was an insult to the latter tribe's collective dignity.

Four men, including one of the "judges" of the tribal jury, dragged the woman from the public meeting and took turns raping her, police said. The teenager said she was taken to a hut and assaulted as hundreds of Mastois stood outside, laughing and cheering. Afterwards, she was forced to walk home naked in front of hundreds of onlookers.

In Pakistan, so-called honour crimes continue unabated and are the preferred way of dealing with affronts to dignity. They are dealt with outside Pakistani law.

Police said they learned of the rape only days after it was committed, on 22 June. But Hina Gillani, secretary general of the private Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), said the police took no formal steps to investigate until Monday.

And that, she said, was only "to protect the government's image after the incident was made public". The rape could not have happened without the connivance of the law, she added. "The whole community is probably involved in this heinous crime. The difficulty will be in getting witnesses to come forward because most people will be too frightened to speak out."

The HRCP must expose atrocities such as this, she said. "We need to look at not just the incident, but the informal systems such as panchyats and jirgas [councils] which operate independently of the law."

The Pakistani state has tolerated these systems and shied from taking them on. "These systems need to be disbanded to make the writ of the state applicable throughout the country," Ms Gillani said.

Though Pakistan's western tribal areas are said to have their own system of justice, this attack on the girl was in a settled area of the Punjab, demonstrating the extent to which tribal customs or practices are still tolerated.

"The state doesn't want to take responsibility for disbanding these informal systems, making this a very strange state of affairs which needs to be tackled," Ms Gillani said. The HRCP is sending a fact-finding mission to the area to determine exactly what happened, and to assist the girl and her family.

The team will visit the village this week to "raise the issue with the community and to let them know there is a civil society in Pakistan which will support them in challenging the existing systems".

Police said the victim's father had filed criminal charges against the men involved. "We will spare no efforts to do justice for the victim," said Malik Saeed, a police official.

A spokesperson from Amnesty International said they had not been able to verify the rape reports yet.