What good is a right that a person cannot realistically exercise?
It is a question I have found myself returning to repeatedly, not because Pakistan lacks laws protecting women, children, persons with disabilities, workers and other marginalised communities, but almost because it has so many of them.
Pakistan does not necessarily suffer from an absence of laws protecting marginalised people. It suffers from the distance between having a right on paper and being able to exercise that right in real life.
Our constitutional vocabulary is, in many respects, clear. Article 25 guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the law, prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and expressly permits the State to make special provisions for the protection of women and children. Other constitutional provisions speak to dignity, access to public places, equality in public employment, education and the participation of women in national life.
And around these constitutional promises, we have built an extensive body of legislation.
Pakistan has laws dealing with domestic violence, workplace harassment, women’s property rights, sexual violence, economic empowerment, disability rights, education, legal aid and representation. The National Commission on the Status of Women lists a substantial body of federal and provincial legislation, including the Anti-Rape (Investigation and Trial) Act 2021, the Enforcement of Women’s Property Rights Act 2020, the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act 2010 and the ICT Rights of Persons with Disability Act 2020.
Punjab, where I am based, has its own substantial framework: the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act 2016, Punjab Commission on the Status of Women Act 2014, Punjab Fair Representation of Women Act 2014, Punjab Women Protection Authority Act 2017 and the Punjab Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities Act 2022, among others.
The Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act is particularly revealing. It recognises not only physical violence, but domestic, sexual, psychological and economic abuse, as well as stalking and cybercrime. It provides mechanisms for protection, residence and monetary orders.
The Federal Enforcement of Women’s Property Rights Act 2020 exists because women are still being deprived of property to which they are legally entitled.
Workplace harassment is not simply a matter of organisational etiquette. Pakistan has had legislation addressing it since 2010, with important amendments made in 2022.
And disability rights are not absent from our legal imagination either.
The ICT Rights of Persons with Disability Act 2020 recognises equality before the law, legal capacity and the support required to exercise that capacity. It goes further and specifically identifies women, children, senior citizens and transgender persons with disabilities as extraordinarily vulnerable, requiring special measures for their protection, development, advancement and empowerment.
So perhaps the question we should be asking is not “Where are the laws?”, it is “What happens between the enactment of a right and the lived experience of the person to whom that right belongs?”
Because somewhere in that distance lies the real problem.
We have built an increasingly sophisticated vocabulary of rights. But we have not built a society in which those rights are equally accessible.
In my opinion, power is where the categories meet.
Consider a woman who has a legal right to inherit property. The law exists. She may not know about it. Or she may know, but cannot afford litigation. She may fear her brothers. Her family may tell her that demanding her inheritance is immoral, selfish or destructive to family unity. She may depend economically on the very people against whom she has to assert her right.
She may know that the law is on her side and still decide that exercising it is simply too costly.
Does the right, then, meaningfully exist for her?
Practically, perhaps not.
The National Commission on the Status of Women has itself identified the continuing denial of women’s inheritance rights despite legal entitlement as a problem tied to patriarchal structures and ineffective implementation and enforcement.
Now consider workplace harassment. The law exists. There is a complaint mechanism. There is an Ombudsperson. But what happens when the harasser is the woman’s employer, senior colleague, professor or supervisor. Or the person who controls her promotion, salary, recommendation or professional future?
The existence of a complaint mechanism does not automatically create the capacity to complain.
A legal right without meaningful access to the mechanism enforcing it is a fragile right. And that is a more complicated problem than simply saying Pakistan has good laws but poor implementation.
The issue is deeper. It is about power.
Feminism asks: Why does gender determine power?
Marxism asks: Why does class determine power?
Disability theory asks: Why does society turn human difference into disadvantage?
And what happens when all three intersect?
Marxism asks us to look beyond the individual and examine structures: who owns, who controls, who produces, who benefits and who is left dependent.
Feminism asks similar questions through the lens of gender: who gets authority, who gets autonomy, whose labour is valued, whose body is controlled and whose voice is believed?
Disability theory asks us to examine something else: why do we take a human difference and construct a social environment in which that difference becomes a disadvantage?
The common thread is power. And gender is one axis of power; Class is another; Disability, yet another.
And they do not operate independently.
A wealthy, educated, professionally established woman and a poor rural woman may both possess exactly the same legal rights. Their ability to invoke that right, however, may be radically different.
One may have a lawyer. The other may not even know where to begin. One may have financial independence. The other may depend upon the very family from whom she needs protection.
One may have a car, a phone, internet access, education, supportive parents and the freedom to walk into an institution and file a complaint. The other may require permission to leave her home.
The law may regard them as equals. Society does not.
“Woman” in itself is not a sufficiently complete socioeconomic category.
I am reminded of Marx’s concepts of the bourgeoisie and proletariat as simplistic equivalents.
Women are not a single socioeconomic class. A woman can be oppressed by patriarchy and privileged by class. She can be economically powerful and socially conservative. She can experience sexism herself and still participate in the exclusion of another woman.
An affluent woman may have access to lawyers, courts, education, transport, technology, financial resources and social networks that another woman simply does not.
She may have fought sexism in her own life and yet reproduce class-based, ableist or patriarchal hierarchies against others.
So the question cannot simply be “Who is oppressed?”. It must also be “Who has power, and in relation to whom?”.
That is why the politics of inclusion cannot be reduced to categories.
This is where Marx’s concept of false consciousness becomes particularly compelling.
It is often reduced to the idea that oppressed people simply do not realise that they are oppressed.
I think that is too crude.
In everyday life, it can be much more subtle. It can be the internalisation of the very social arrangements that limit us.
A woman is told, “You don’t need your inheritance. Your brothers will look after you.”
Or, “Why work? Your husband provides everything.” “It was only a joke.”
And perhaps the most dangerous one, “This is just how things are.”
At some point, the person being excluded may begin to understand exclusion as normal.
The structure no longer has to impose itself through force. It has been internalised.
The same thing can happen around disability. “He doesn’t need school.” “She doesn’t understand anyway.” “They’re all like that.” “Everyone should be treated equally.”
Thislast sentence sounds wonderfully egalitarian. But sometimes it is the language of exclusion.
Because treating everyone identically is not necessarily treating everyone fairly.
Equality says’ “everyone gets the same thing.”
Equity recognises that people may require different support to achieve genuine equality of opportunity.
But inclusion goes further. It asks a more uncomfortable question: Why was the system designed in a way that required some people to need special assistance in the first place?
Imagine a building with one entrance and a staircase. We tell everyone, “Everyone is welcome.”
Then we build a ramp. That is progress. But the deeper question is why the building was designed with the assumption that everyone would approach it in the same way.
Inclusion is not simply adding the ramp. It is beginning to design with human difference in mind.
That distinction matters enormously in disability rights.
Pakistan’s disability legislation increasingly reflects the idea that persons with disabilities are entitled not merely to pity or rehabilitation, but to equality, legal capacity, access, mobility, protection and empowerment. Yet legislation alone cannot make a society inclusive.
We have confused equality with inclusion. We pass a law prohibiting discrimination. We create a quota. We establish a protection centre. We appoint an Ombudsperson. We create a helpline. We announce a disability policy. We put ramps into public buildings. We establish special education programmes. And then we congratulate ourselves for having become inclusive.
But inclusion is not the existence of a mechanism.
Inclusion is whether the person at the margins can actually use it.
A woman cannot be said to be meaningfully protected because a complaint form exists if fear prevents her from submitting it.
A disabled child cannot be said to have an educational right because a school exists if the school cannot accommodate the child.
A neurodivergent employee cannot be said to have equal employment rights if the workplace interprets difference as incompetence.
A woman cannot be said to be economically empowered merely because she is legally entitled to property if family structures make claiming it practically impossible.
A person cannot be meaningfully included in public life if the physical, sensory, communicational and institutional environment has been designed without them.
The right exists. The access does not. And that distinction is everything.
What happens to the woman who is also disabled?
She is not necessarily experiencing gender discrimination and disability discrimination as two separate problems. Their interaction can create an entirely different form of vulnerability.
The law itself recognises this. The ICT Rights of Persons with Disability Act specifically identifies women with disabilities as extraordinarily vulnerable and requires special measures for their protection and empowerment.
But think about what that means in practice.
What happens to a woman who has difficulty communicating? To a woman with an intellectual disability? To an autistic woman? To a woman with a psychosocial disability? When her credibility is questioned because she communicates differently?
And what happens when society sees the disability before it sees the woman?
These are not abstract questions. They are questions about access to justice itself.
Perhaps I am unusually conscious of this gap because I occupy several positions at once.
I am a lawyer who works with law, a woman who has spent years thinking about women’s rights, and a mother of an autistic child. Through my work with the Lahore Autism Initiative, I have seen another version of the same problem: rights can be legislated long before societies become capable of delivering them.
A child can have a right to education and still find the school door closed. A person can have a right to dignity and still encounter systems designed without them in mind.
A woman can have a legal right to protection and still find herself economically, socially or emotionally unable to reach it.
And a family can spend its life fighting not for extraordinary privileges, but for ordinary things that everyone else takes for granted.
There is a temptation, particularly among lawyers, to measure progress by legislation. And legislation matters enormously. The right law can change behaviour, create institutions, redistribute power, provide remedies and hold the State and society accountable. But legislation is only the beginning. The real test of a right lies in what happens afterwards: whether the person knows it exists, can afford to invoke it, can reach the institution meant to protect it, can communicate with that institution, find legal and practical support, and do so without fear of retaliation or further trauma. It lies in whether someone will listen, investigate, believe, protect and ultimately hold the system accountable. A right becomes real only when the person who needs it has the power and the means to exercise it.
The State can legislate, criminalise, establish institutions, appoint officials and create commissions. But its responsibility cannot end with putting a law on the books. It must also create the conditions, resources and systems that allow those laws to function in practice. The distance between a legal promise and a lived right is, ultimately, a measure of how effectively the State has fulfilled its responsibility
In August 2026, a disturbing case in Lahore involved allegations that a 20-year-old woman with a learning disability was raped inside a police station. The accused assistant sub-inspector was arrested, while all 78 officers and staff at the station were suspended amid allegations that personnel failed to prevent or report the misconduct. The case is extraordinary precisely because the police station, the institution to which a vulnerable person should be able to turn for protection, became the setting in which the alleged abuse occurred.
One case cannot prove that every institution fails. But one case can force us to ask a very uncomfortable question:
What happens when the institution that exists to enforce a right is itself unable, or unwilling, to protect the person exercising it?
It is a question of institutional design, accountability and power.
The question is not confined to policing. In April 2026, the Lahore High Court directed the Punjab government to restart a recruitment process after finding that the statutory three per cent quota for persons with disabilities had not been properly reflected in advertisements for more than 2,000 medical officer posts. The court treated the omission not as a minor procedural defect, but as a violation of constitutional and statutory protections intended to secure inclusion.
The real test of inclusion is not what our laws promise, but what people are actually able to experience. Can a woman claim her inheritance without fear? Can a domestic worker report abuse safely? Can a woman challenge harassment without risking her livelihood? Can a person with a disability access justice, transport, healthcare and public institutions with dignity? Does an autistic child enter a school as a child who belongs, or as a problem that needs to be managed?
These are not peripheral questions. They are where the real constitution of a society is written; not only in its statutes and judgments, but in the distance between what the law promises and what an ordinary person can actually access.
This is where feminism, Marxism and disability theory converge: each asks us to examine a different form of power, gendered, economic and structural. Law gives us the language to challenge these inequalities, but law alone cannot dismantle them. That requires functioning institutions, resources, education, economic independence and, above all, a cultural shift in how we understand difference. Accommodation is not privilege. Protection is not charity. Inclusion is not an act of generosity.
A society is not inclusive simply because its laws recognise those who have been excluded. Inclusion begins when a person at the margins no longer needs extraordinary courage, money, education, connections or privilege to access an ordinary right.
Until then, we have equality in legislation but inequality in lived experience; protection on paper but vulnerability in practice; sophisticated language around rights but unequal access to them.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question is not whether rights exist, but who can actually afford to use them, because the right to exist is not the same as the right to belong.
