Marriage: When rejection becomes a crime

By Muhammad Imran, Staff Member, SAHSOL-LUMS Maria Batool, SASHSOL-LUMS Law Graduate Asma Rahmat, Final Year Law Student, SLC

The killing of a woman for refusing a marriage proposal exposes the patriarchal assumptions that continue to undermine women’s autonomy in Pakistan.

A woman’s refusal to marry a man should be the end of a proposal, not the beginning of a tragedy. Yet, in societies where masculinity is frequently conflated with authority and a woman’s consent is subordinated to male entitlement, rejection can become a pretext for intimidation, coercion and, in its most brutal manifestation, murder. The Supreme Court of Pakistan’s judgment in Muhammad Kamran v. The State and another, Criminal Review Petition No. 73 of 2025, brings this disturbing reality into sharp focus. By rejecting the argument that the refusal of a marriage proposal constituted a mitigating circumstance, the Court confronted not merely an individual crime but the social attitudes that continue to endanger women who exercise their right to choose.

The petitioner, Muhammad Kamran, had been sentenced to death for the murder of Mst. Memoona Shaheen. The prosecution’s case was that he killed her because she and her family had rejected his marriage proposal. Seeking a review of the Supreme Court’s earlier judgment, he argued that the personal and emotional nature of the motive justified converting his death sentence into imprisonment for life. He also relied on the period he had spent in incarceration to invoke the principle of life expectancy. The Court rejected his plea, finding that the circumstances disclosed no compelling mitigating consideration and that the nature of the offence did not warrant the relief sought.

The most significant aspect of the judgment is its rejection of the assumption that a woman’s refusal can somehow diminish the culpability of the man who responds with violence. A rejected proposal may cause disappointment, but disappointment does not confer a right to retaliate. Nor can wounded pride be elevated into a legally acceptable justification for taking another person’s life. The distinction is fundamental: an offender’s motive may help explain his conduct, but it does not necessarily mitigate its gravity. Where a woman is deliberately killed for refusing a marriage proposal, the motive may instead reveal a deeply troubling belief that her autonomy is subordinate to a man’s expectations.

This is precisely where gender sensitivity becomes indispensable to judicial reasoning. Gender-sensitive adjudication does not require courts to abandon established legal principles or presume guilt based on gender. It requires them to examine the facts without reproducing discriminatory assumptions that normalise male control over women. A woman’s refusal is not an act of provocation simply because a man finds it unacceptable. To treat it as such would risk transferring responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim, implying that a woman’s exercise of choice contributed to the violence inflicted upon her.

Such reasoning would be especially dangerous in a society where women’s decisions concerning marriage, relationships and personal independence are still frequently subjected to family and community control. The underlying problem is not merely individual anger. It is the patriarchal notion that a man may claim a woman’s affection, that persistence entitles him to compliance, and that rejection constitutes an affront to his honour. In this distorted worldview, the woman’s independent will becomes an obstacle to be overcome rather than a right to be respected.

The concept of ghairat, or honour, often reinforces this mindset. When male honour is defined through a woman’s obedience, autonomy is recast as defiance. The consequences can range from harassment and stalking to acid attacks, forced marriage and so-called honour killings. Such violence cannot be understood adequately as an eruption of private emotion detached from social conditions. It is also sustained by attitudes that attach greater importance to male pride than to female freedom.

The Supreme Court’s discussion of customary practices such as ghag, swara and watta-satta is therefore pertinent. These practices differ in their forms and circumstances, but coercive manifestations share a disturbing characteristic: women’s marital choices are subordinated to the wishes or interests of men, families or communities. Under ghag, a man may unilaterally assert a claim to a woman without her consent. Under swara, a girl may be given in marriage to settle a dispute or compensate for an offence committed by another person. In coercive forms of watta-satta, a woman’s interests may be made contingent upon reciprocal arrangements between families.

The common denominator is the denial of women’s status as autonomous individuals. A woman becomes a means of settling disputes, preserving family relationships or satisfying male expectations. Her consent is either disregarded or treated as secondary to considerations determined by others. Such practices are not merely unfortunate social customs; where coercion or other unlawful conduct is involved, they raise serious questions of legal accountability, equality and human dignity.

Not every customary marriage arrangement is necessarily coercive, and the distinction matters. The decisive question is whether the individuals concerned have exercised genuine freedom of choice. Tradition cannot, by itself, establish consent, just as the existence of family approval cannot substitute for the woman’s own decision. A marriage entered into voluntarily is fundamentally different from one imposed through threats, social pressure or the fear of violence.

The constitutional framework supports this distinction. Article 9 of the Constitution protects life and liberty, Article 14 safeguards the dignity of the individual, and Article 25 guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the law. These protections cannot be meaningful if women are expected to surrender their personal choices to avoid provoking men. Pakistan’s obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women also reinforce the principle that women must enjoy equal rights in marriage and family relations, including the right to freely choose a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent.

The principle is straightforward, although its social acceptance remains uneven: no man possesses a right to a woman’s affection, companionship, or consent. A proposal creates no entitlement, an engagement does not extinguish autonomy, and a previous expression of interest does not make consent irrevocable. The right to refuse must be as meaningful as the freedom to accept. Otherwise, consent becomes a hollow concept, exercised only so long as it conforms to male expectations.

The Court’s reliance on the principle of life expectancy raises a separate but equally important sentencing question. As the judgment explains, a condemned prisoner cannot automatically claim commutation merely because the period spent in custody resembles the period that some prisoners serving life sentences may undergo after the application of remission rules. The Court referred to Sher Afzal v. State in explaining the relevant criteria, including a minimum period of twenty-five years’ incarceration, additional compelling mitigating circumstances, and the nature of the offence. The petitioner, having been arrested in September 2012, had not completed the stated threshold by the time of the hearing in September 2026.

The distinction between a sentence of death and imprisonment for life must, of course, be applied according to the governing law and precedents. Equally, the gravity of an offence must not become a substitute for careful judicial analysis. Gender sensitivity is not a licence to disregard individualized sentencing, evidentiary requirements or the legal standards governing review jurisdiction. Its contribution lies in ensuring that discriminatory assumptions are not smuggled into the assessment of motive, culpability or mitigation.

In the present case, the argument that rejection of a marriage proposal should reduce the gravity of the offence was particularly problematic. Accepting such reasoning could reinforce the notion that a woman bears some responsibility for managing a man’s emotional response to rejection. The law must resist this reversal of responsibility. A man is accountable for the violence he chooses to inflict; a woman cannot be blamed for exercising a lawful choice simply because that choice displeases him.

There is also a wider social dimension to the judgment. Courts do more than settle disputes between individual litigants. Their reasoning communicates which social attitudes the legal system will tolerate and which it will reject. By refusing to recognise a woman’s rejection as a mitigating circumstance, the Supreme Court has articulated a principle that extends beyond the immediate facts: wounded pride cannot take precedence over human life, and customary expectations cannot override individual autonomy.

Yet judicial condemnation, however emphatic, cannot by itself eliminate violence against women. Laws criminalising forced marriage and abusive customary practices must be implemented effectively. Police officers must respond seriously to threats, stalking and harassment before they escalate into lethal violence. Prosecutors must build cases that withstand scrutiny, while courts must ensure that proceedings are conducted without victim-blaming stereotypes. Educational institutions and public authorities must also challenge the idea that persistence in the face of refusal is evidence of masculinity or that violence can restore a man’s honour.

The family, too, has a role in dismantling these assumptions. Boys must be taught that rejection is an ordinary part of human relationships, not a humiliation that requires retaliation. Girls must be able to make decisions about their futures without fear that their independence will expose them to punishment. A society that teaches women to accommodate male entitlement, rather than teaching men to respect women’s autonomy, will continue to reproduce the conditions in which such violence becomes possible.

Ultimately, the significance of the Supreme Court’s judgment lies in its refusal to convert a woman’s right to say no into an excuse for the man who kills her. The case should prompt a wider reconsideration of the relationship between patriarchy, criminal responsibility and the administration of justice in Pakistan. The measure of a society’s commitment to equality is not simply whether its laws formally recognize women’s rights, but whether those rights can be exercised without fear.

A woman is neither a possession to be claimed nor a symbol of male honour to be defended through violence. She is an individual whose dignity, liberty and choices deserve equal protection under the law. The rejection of a marriage proposal is not a crime against a man’s honour; killing a woman because she refuses is an assault on her most fundamental rights. No appeal to tradition, emotion, or wounded pride should be permitted to obscure that distinction. This is a murder, and the death penalty is its sentence! That is all.