Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani Photo by Eddie Adams Human Rights
Strategies "You are fighting with your pen, you are fighting
with the instruments of law, against a power with a gun, a power
that does not recognize the law." For the past three decades
Asma and her sister Hina have been at the forefront of both
Pakistan’s women’s and human rights movements. Both have been
subjected to twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance by the state
since 1996. In 1980 they helped found the Women’s Action Forum
to help women obtain divorces from abusive husbands. In 1981
they founded the first all-women’s law firm in Pakistan, and in
1986 they founded the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, where
Jilani serves as chair. Threatened with death from the very
halls of parliament when she called for the abolition of
repressive shari‘a laws contravening constitutional protection
of women, Asma Jahangir also put her life on the line in 1993
when she represented an illiterate fourteen-year-old sentenced
to death for blasphemous graffiti