In July 2025, a woman named Bano Bibi was handed a Quran by her own brother, told to walk seven paces away from him, and then shot three times. Her husband was killed moments later. Both of them were tried, convicted and murdered for the crime of choosing their partners. A tribal council in Balochistan had ordered both killings weeks before. The most revealing part of the case is not the killing itself but what happened afterwards, no action was taken for weeks? Until the video went “viral” on social media and only then did the police hesitantly intervene.
Parliament has actually tried to deal with killings like these twice in the last two decades. The 2004 amendments wrote honour killing into the murder provisions as its own category for the first time. Then the 2016 law went further and tried to stop these killings from being pardoned away by the very families that ordered them. Both attempts have failed, and they seem to have failed for the same two reasons, both of which sit deep in Pakistani criminal law. The first is the rule that murder is a private wrong belonging to the victim’s family, who may pardon the killer or accept payment instead of a prosecution. The second is the defence of grave and sudden provocation, where a sudden loss of self-control reduces murder to a lesser charge.
The Sustainable Social Development Organisation counted 547 honour killings in Pakistan in 2024. Fewer than 2% ended in conviction. The obvious explanation would be an evidence problem, since murders inside families are hard to prove. But that explanation does not really survive contact with the facts. Qandeel Baloch’s brother confessed to strangling her on camera and told reporters afterwards that he felt no remorse. Killers in these cases are usually relatives, known to the family and often to the police well before any court gets involved. The conviction rate is measuring something else: what happens to a case after everyone already knows who did it.
Since a 1990 ruling by the Federal Shariat Court, murder in Pakistan has been treated in law as a wrong against the victim’s heirs rather than against the state. The heirs can waive qisas and pardon the killer, or accept diyat, which is compensation paid in place of a prosecution. For a murder between strangers this system can at least function, because the family has no reason to protect the person who killed their relative. But when the killer is a relative too, the whole logic falls apart, because the people legally entitled to forgive the murder are often the ones who ordered it or watched it happen. Police data cited by the UK Home Office found husbands responsible for around 70% of domestic violence murders in Pakistan in 2024, with fathers, brothers and in-laws making up most of the rest. In the Bano Bibi case, one of the sixteen people arrested was her own mother, Gul Jan Bibi, who told reporters that the killings followed “centuries-old Baloch traditions” and that no wrongdoing had occurred. So under the ordinary rules of qisas, a relative like her can be a suspect in the killing and, at the same time, the person legally entitled to pardon it.
The 2016 law was passed three months after Qandeel Baloch’s murder to close off exactly this problem. It placed honour killing inside a legal category called fasad-fil-arz, which roughly means mischief on earth, and rewrote Section 311 of the Penal Code so that a pardon from the family would no longer be enough on its own to free a killer. Qandeel Baloch’s brother, Waseem, was convicted under this law in 2019 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Then in February 2022, a Lahore High Court bench acquitted him after his parents submitted a pardon. The law that was passed because of his sister’s murder failed in her own case.
The wording of Section 311 explains a lot of that outcome. The section says that where the family does not unanimously agree to waive the right of qisas, or where the fasad-fil-arz principle applies, a court may punish the offender, and that if the killing was committed for honour, the punishment must be life imprisonment. But that final clause only takes effect once a case is already inside the waiver process. Nowhere does the section state plainly that an honour killing cannot be pardoned at all. Lawyers pointed out this ambiguity within days of the law passing in 2016, and parliament negligently never went back and corrected the wording.
The provocation defence is even harder to simply explain, because its survival cannot be blamed on sloppy drafting. The Federal Shariat Court ruled in 1990 that provocation, however grave, does not reduce the seriousness of murder under Islamic law. Despite this, the Supreme Court has continued to treat honour killings and provocation killings as separate categories, and has accepted provocation as a defence where a man says he found a female relative in a compromising position. In one published judgment, the Court reduced a sentence on these grounds and stated that illicit sex involving a female family member is itself enough provocation to remove a man’s self-control, in essence justifying the grounds of a cold-blooded murder. The judgment cites a chain of earlier cases drawing the same distinction. In other words, this is settled practice at the apex court, and a trial judge who follows it is applying precedent correctly. That is what makes it worse than a loophole.
By the time Bano Bibi was killed, neither mechanism had changed. What changed in her case was the government’s response once the video went viral. Prosecutors charged the killers under the Anti-Terrorism Act alongside the ordinary murder provisions, a route that strips the family of any power to pardon the accused. It is worth pausing on what that choice admits. Why would a government confident in its honor-killing law need that workaround?
Another amendment stitched onto Section 311 is unlikely to achieve much, since that strategy has already failed in a case the whole country was watching. A serious reform would create a separate offence for honour and family-motivated killing, defined and punished outside the qisas and diyat framework entirely, so the question of a family pardon never arises. It would also bar the provocation defence in any case where the victim is a spouse, sibling or child of the accused. The Quetta lawyer Jalila Haider said after the Bano Bibi killings that public anger over such cases never lasts, and that large parts of rural Balochistan have no functioning courts, only jirgas. She may be proved wrong this time, but that depends on what happens in an anti-terrorism court in Quetta, in a prosecution the state only began because it got caught on video.
