A brutal video surfaced recently from Margat, Balochistan — its contents as chilling as they are damning. A tribal jirga had sentenced a man and a woman to death for undisclosed “offenses.” The pair was led into the desert and executed on camera. Their killers, unflinching, shot them point-blank and shared the footage widely — not just as documentation, but as a message: defiance will be punished.

Eleven suspects, including the tribal elder who ordered the killings, have been arrested. But arrests alone cannot undo the deeper truth: this was not just a double homicide. It was the public reenactment of a centuries-old power structure built on controlling women’s choices.

There is no honour in murder. There never has been.

Between January and November 2024, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded 346 killings linked to so-called honour. Activists believe the real number likely exceeds 1,000 annually. Most of the victims are women. Most of the perpetrators are male relatives. Convictions are rare. Justice is often deferred, diluted, or entirely denied.

These crimes are not isolated. They follow a pattern — a society that polices women’s agency, and a legal system that too often folds under pressure.

Take the case of Farzana Parveen, stoned to death in 2014 outside the Lahore High Court for marrying against her family’s will — while police and the judiciary stood by. Or Qandeel Baloch, Pakistan’s unapologetic social media star, strangled by her brother in 2016. He was convicted, then freed in 2022 after the family forgave him — an act made possible by legal gaps the government had pledged to close.

From the Kohistan video case to the murder of Samia Shahid — from teenage girls killed over social media to cousins gunned down for choosing partners — the pattern remains unchanged: outrage, arrests, silence.

Legislative steps have been taken. In 2016, Pakistan’s parliament passed a law removing the right of forgiveness in honour killing cases, mandating life sentences. But in practice, enforcement remains patchy. Trials drag on. Victims’ families are pressured or disappear from the process. Illegal tribal jirgas, declared unlawful by the Supreme Court in 2019, continue to operate in plain sight, handing out death sentences under the guise of tradition.

Why are these parallel systems still tolerated?

It’s time to move beyond symbolic gestures. Filing an FIR is not justice. Public outrage is not reform. If the state does not act forcefully and consistently, it becomes complicit in a culture that enables gender-based violence.

Pakistan must do more — urgently and decisively:

• Treat honour killings as what they are: premeditated murders.
• Make the state the primary complainant in all such cases, ensuring family pardons are void.
• Crack down on illegal jirgas, especially in cases involving personal freedoms and women’s rights.
• Create real safety nets — from government-run shelters to robust witness protection for survivors, whistleblowers, and those most at risk: young women asserting independence in public and private spheres.

The law must not just exist. It must be applied — consistently, publicly, and without compromise.

As Benazir Bhutto once said, the fight for women’s rights is not against men, but for justice and equality. That fight is not theoretical. It is urgent. And it is being waged with blood.

Until a woman’s life is treated as her own — not her family’s honour or her community’s burden — Pakistan cannot claim progress. Her choices should not trigger her death. And her murder should never be negotiable.

Justice must belong to her — not to those who believe they have the right to end her life.