Mudassir Rizwan
There are some rights that simply cannot be traded, no matter how willing the parties are to trade them. A recent judgment from the Lahore High Court, delivered in a child maintenance case, restates this principle with welcome clarity: a child’s legal entitlements do not belong to the parents, and parents therefore have no authority to bargain them away, however convenient such a bargain might seem at the time. In holding that parental consent cannot validate an arrangement that runs contrary to the welfare of a minor, the court has done more than settle one family dispute. It has reinforced the entire architecture of legal protection built around children in this country, and it has reminded family courts of their duty to act as guardians of the child’s interest, not merely as facilitators of parental convenience.
The facts before the court were troubling in their own right. A father and mother, negotiating what was presumably meant to be an amicable resolution of their dispute, arrived at an agreement in which the mother undertook not to seek future maintenance for their minor daughter. As if that were not enough, the agreement went further still: it stipulated that the child would also forgo her right to inherit from her father. Two separate rights, one rooted in the ongoing duty of a father to support his child, the other flowing directly from Islamic law of succession, were signed away in a single private settlement between two adults, neither of whom actually held the right they were purporting to waive.
This is the crux of what the High Court took issue with. A mother, the court observed, may certainly pursue a maintenance claim on her child’s behalf. She acts, in that role, as a representative and protector of the child’s interest, not as an owner of the right itself. What she cannot do is extinguish that right permanently through her own signature, because the right was never hers to give away. The same logic applies with even greater force to inheritance. Under Islamic law, a child’s share in a parent’s estate is not discretionary, it is mandated, fixed, and non-negotiable. No contract between parents, however carefully drafted or mutually agreed, can override what the law has already settled. To permit otherwise would be to open a door that, once opened, would be almost impossible to close. Countless children across the country could find themselves stripped of maintenance or inheritance simply because their parents, in the heat of separation or the desire for a quick resolution, agreed to terms that suited the adults but abandoned the child.
It is worth pausing on just how easily this kind of arrangement can slip past scrutiny if courts are not vigilant. Family disputes are, by their nature, emotionally charged and often protracted. There is a strong institutional pull toward settlement, toward closing the file, toward giving both parties what they say they want so that the matter can be resolved and everyone can move on. But children are not parties to these negotiations in any meaningful sense. They have no voice in the settlement room, no lawyer advocating solely for their interest, and no ability to object when their future security is quietly negotiated away. This is precisely why the Lahore High Court’s clarification of the family court’s role matters so much. A family court, the judgment makes clear, cannot simply act as a recording agency, rubber-stamping whatever the parents have agreed to. It carries an independent legal duty to examine whether a proposed compromise actually serves the welfare of the minor involved, and it must do so actively, not as a formality.
The specific direction that follows from this is significant. No settlement, the court has said, should be accepted if it permanently waives a child’s right to maintenance or inheritance. And where a court does approve any compromise touching a minor’s interest, it must record specific reasons showing exactly how that compromise benefits the child. This is not a minor procedural footnote. It transforms judicial approval from a passive formality into an accountable act, one that leaves a paper trail explaining why the judge believed the arrangement was genuinely in the child’s interest. It also draws together, in a single coherent thread, several strands of law that have long existed but have not always been applied with this kind of rigor: the constitutional protection owed to children, the framework of the Family Courts Act, the guardianship principles embedded in the Guardians and Wards Act, and the broader welfare doctrine that is supposed to govern every matter touching a minor’s future.
Beyond its immediate legal effect, this judgment carries an educational value that should not be underestimated. Many parents, caught up in the difficulty of separation, genuinely do not realise that their child’s legal rights are not theirs to negotiate. A settlement that feels fair and final to two adults may, in law, be entirely void with respect to the child’s own entitlements. Lawyers and mediators who draft these agreements carry a professional responsibility here too. It is not enough to produce a document both parents are willing to sign; the document must also survive scrutiny against the child’s independent legal rights, and those advising the parties should know this before the ink is dry.
In the end, what the Lahore High Court has affirmed is a simple but important idea: justice in family matters cannot be measured by how quickly a dispute is closed. It must be measured by how well it protects those who have no way of protecting themselves. Children do not choose their parents’ disputes, and they should never be made to pay the price of a settlement reached without them.
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