Shazia Ramzan
For generations, the deprivation of women’s inheritance in Pakistan has operated through a quiet and largely unchallenged system of family pressure, forged documents, social coercion, and manipulated consent. A woman would sign away her share, or be made to sign it away, and the transaction would be dressed in the language of voluntary renunciation. Courts would accept a simple affidavit or a stamp paper as sufficient proof that she had acted freely. Brothers would inherit everything. Sisters would inherit silence. And the law, for all its written protections, would look the other way.
The Federal Constitutional Court has now looked directly at this practice and rejected it. In a 33-page judgment authored by Chief Justice Aminuddin Khan, the court has set aside a Balochistan High Court decision that had upheld a compromise agreement effectively stripping two sisters of their lawful inheritance. What the FCC has delivered is not merely a ruling in one case. It is a comprehensive recalibration of how every court and revenue authority in Pakistan must approach any transaction that affects a female heir’s share of an estate.
The philosophical weight of the judgment is as significant as its legal content. The court has made explicit what Islamic law has always stated but Pakistani practice has consistently ignored: a woman’s inheritance is not a privilege extended by the state or the family. It is a God-given right. No regional custom, no family tradition, no social norm, and no informal arrangement carries the legal authority to override it. The only person who can relinquish a woman’s inheritance is the woman herself, and she can only do so under conditions of free, informed, and genuinely independent consent. Anything short of that standard is, in the court’s own framing, liable to be viewed with the gravest suspicion and subjected to the most exacting judicial scrutiny.
The shift in the burden of proof is where the ruling will make its most practical difference. Previously, the burden fell implicitly on the woman to prove she had been coerced. The FCC has reversed this entirely. The burden now rests heavily on the beneficiary of any inheritance transaction, meaning the brothers, male relatives, or whoever stands to gain must demonstrate through unimpeachable evidence that the woman acted freely, knowingly, and with complete understanding of what she was giving up. A stamp paper will no longer suffice. An affidavit signed in a room full of male relatives will no longer be treated as voluntary consent. The evidentiary standard has been raised to a level that reflects the seriousness of what is actually at stake.
This matters enormously because the tools previously used to strip women of inheritance were precisely those low-threshold instruments. Forged signatures, documents signed under duress, affidavits produced in circumstances no reasonable person would call free, these were the mechanisms through which an entire generation of women was quietly dispossessed. The law offered protection on paper while practice delivered dispossession on the ground. By setting a far higher standard of proof and directing all courts and revenue authorities to apply it consistently, the FCC has closed the gap between what the law says and what actually happens to women when family estates are divided.
The ruling also carries an important message about the limits of custom and tradition as legal defences. Pakistan’s inheritance disputes have long been complicated by the invocation of local practice, tribal norms, and regional traditions as justifications for arrangements that deny women their shares. The FCC has been unambiguous: none of these carry weight against a constitutional and divinely ordained right. The woman’s entitlement does not diminish because her community has historically ignored it. It does not weaken because her family considers it inconvenient. It exists, it is legally enforceable, and it must now be actively protected rather than passively mentioned.
What remains, as always, is implementation. A ruling of this clarity and significance can still be undermined at the revenue office level, in the lower courts, and in the countless informal settlements that never reach any court at all. Women in rural areas, women without legal representation, women facing family pressure before any official process begins, these are the people whose inheritance the ruling is most intended to protect and who remain most vulnerable to the same old mechanisms operating slightly more carefully.
The FCC has done its part. It has produced a judgment that is legally sound, philosophically grounded, and practically specific. The question now is whether the institutions beneath it, the revenue authorities, the district courts, the legal aid systems, will apply it with the seriousness it demands. A landmark ruling that sits unimplemented is still better than no ruling at all. But it falls far short of justice for the women it was written to protect.
The best-selling books of Republic Policy Think Tank, including the landmark book The Bureaucratic Coup, are available at Vanguard Books, Liberty Books, Readings, Kitab Sarai, Sang-e-Meel, Saeed Book Stores, and others across Pakistan. Contact for home delivery: 0300 9552542.
