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The Gap Between Law and Justice: Civilian Governance and the Failure to Enforce Gender Rights in Pakistan
Ms Tamseel Aqdas
Analysis Series
Analysis//0016/May/2026/London-Dialogue. 04 May 2026
Introduction
In 2010, Pakistan enacted the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act, a piece of legislation widely praised by international bodies as a meaningful step toward formalising women’s rights within the country’s legal architecture. Four years later, the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act 2016 extended these protections further, establishing dedicated violence prevention mechanisms and technological safeguards. Across the provinces, new commissions, ombudspersons, and reporting frameworks were created. On paper, Pakistan built a serious legal infrastructure.
And yet the distance between these statutes and the lives of women in Pakistan remains vast. Harassment complaints are routinely dismissed or left unresolved. Domestic violence cases are inadequately investigated. Access to justice is unevenly distributed across geography, class, and administrative context. Legal provisions that should translate into protection instead remain largely symbolic, their promise undermined by the very governments that created them.
This article argues that the primary driver of this failure is not the content of the laws but the structural pathologies of civilian governance in Pakistan: political short-termism, bureaucratic fragmentation, chronic under-investment in enforcement capacity, and the persistent use of legislative reform as a substitute for institutional delivery. Understanding these dynamics is essential not only for domestic reform but also for international partners, including the United Kingdom, whose development and governance programmes operate within, and are constrained by, these very failures. Pakistan’s gender rights laws are not failing because they were poorly drafted. They are failing because the civilian governments that passed them never built the institutional infrastructure required to make them real.
Legislative Ambition, Institutional Absence
Pakistan’s gender rights legislation has expanded considerably since the early 2000s, driven in large part by civilian governments seeking to demonstrate democratic credibility and align with international obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which Pakistan ratified in 1996. The volume of legislation is not in question. What is in question is whether any of the governments that passed these laws made the parallel investments in institutional infrastructure necessary to implement them.
The answer, consistently, has been no. Enforcement agencies tasked with investigating gender-based violence have remained chronically under-resourced. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has documented year after year that police responses to domestic violence cases are inadequate, that specialised training for enforcement personnel is minimal, and that the formal complaint mechanisms established under harassment and violence legislation are poorly publicised and functionally inaccessible to many of the women they were designed to serve.
This pattern reflects a fundamental problem with how civilian governments in Pakistan have approached gender rights: as a legislative project rather than a governance challenge. Passing a law generates political visibility. Building the administrative capacity to enforce it does not. The incentive structures of electoral politics in Pakistan consistently reward the former and neglect the latter.
Bureaucratic Fragmentation and the Devolution Problem
The constitutional devolution introduced by the Eighteenth Amendment in 2010 transferred significant governance responsibilities to the provinces, including many areas relevant to gender rights, health, education, and social protection. In principle, devolution was intended to bring government closer to citizens and improve public service delivery. In practice, it created a governance architecture in which accountability is diffuse, mandates overlap, and coordination between federal and provincial tiers is structurally weak.
The consequences for gender rights enforcement have been significant. Federal legislative frameworks establish standards, but provincial governments are responsible for implementation. Where provincial capacity is limited, politically fractured, or administratively dysfunctional, implementation fails, and there is no robust federal mechanism to hold provinces to account. The result is a patchwork system in which access to legal protection varies enormously depending on where a woman lives, not on what the law formally guarantees her.
According to the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, Pakistan consistently scores in the lowest quartile globally on government effectiveness and rule of law metrics. These are not marginal deficiencies. They reflect deep structural dysfunctions in how civilian governments design, resource, and manage public institutions. The gender rights implementation gap is one visible consequence of a broader governance crisis that successive elected governments have failed to address.
Political Incentives and the Performance of Reform
Civilian governments in Pakistan have repeatedly demonstrated that legislative reform serves political purposes that are largely decoupled from implementation. When the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz passed the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act in 2016, the government faced immediate backlash from religious parties who characterised the legislation as an attack on family values. The political response was to defend the law’s principle while quietly declining to invest in the administrative mechanisms that would make it operational. The law remained on the books; the enforcement remained absent.
This dynamic is not unique to any single party. The Pakistan People’s Party, historically associated with progressive social policies, has similarly struggled to translate legislative commitments into institutional delivery. In Sindh, where the PPP has governed since 2008, gender-based violence rates remain among the highest in the country, and the Aurat Foundation’s Violence Against Women reports have consistently documented inadequate state response mechanisms. Governance failure, in this respect, is bipartisan.
The common thread is an approach to gender rights that treats international compliance, donor relations, and electoral signalling as the primary objectives of legal reform. Implementation, which requires sustained political will, institutional investment, and tolerance for the friction of enforcement, is consistently deferred. Laws accumulate; enforcement capacity does not.
Regional Inequality and the Limits of Federal Governance
The governance failures described above are distributed unevenly across Pakistan’s territory, with the most severe consequences falling on women in rural, peripheral, and economically marginalised communities. In Baluchistan and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where administrative infrastructure is weakest and geographic isolation is most acute, the gap between legal entitlement and lived reality is sharpest. Women in these areas face not only the structural barriers common across Pakistan but the additional disadvantage of being effectively beyond the reach of functional state institutions.
The UNDP’s Human Development Reports on Pakistan have consistently highlighted the correlation between provincial administrative capacity and gender development outcomes. Provinces with stronger bureaucratic infrastructure and higher public expenditure on social services show comparatively better outcomes on education, health, and legal access for women, not because their laws are different but because their institutions are better resourced and managed.
Federal governments have not responded to this regional inequality with targeted institutional investment. Funding allocations for gender-specific enforcement mechanisms remain small and politically vulnerable to budget pressures. There is no credible national monitoring framework capable of tracking implementation across provinces and generating the accountability signals necessary to drive reform.
Implications for UK Engagement
For the United Kingdom, which maintains substantial bilateral engagement with Pakistan through the UK-Pakistan Strategic Partnership and a range of development, rule-of-law, and governance programmes, the dynamics described in this article have direct consequences. UK-funded initiatives that operate through Pakistani civilian institutions inherit the dysfunctions of those institutions. Programmes that focus on legislative reform or policy design without addressing enforcement infrastructure are unlikely to achieve durable outcomes.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has increasingly emphasised adaptive programming and governance diagnostics as tools for improving development effectiveness. Applying these tools rigorously in the Pakistani context means confronting the reality that civilian governance failure, not merely legal inadequacy, is the central problem. This requires conditioning programme design on realistic assessments of institutional capacity and demanding evidence of enforcement investment, not just legislative adoption, as a marker of partner commitment.
It also requires support for the independent monitoring bodies and civil society organisations, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the Aurat Foundation, that can track implementation, document failures, and generate the public accountability pressure that formal government structures have consistently failed to supply. These organisations operate in difficult conditions with limited resources. They represent the most credible counterweight to the governance pathologies that undermine gender rights enforcement, and they deserve sustained, long-term support from international partners.
What Needs to Change
Pakistan’s gender rights implementation crisis is, at its core, a crisis of civilian governance. The legal frameworks are largely in place. What is absent is the institutional commitment to make them function: adequate resourcing of enforcement agencies, clear accountability structures across federal and provincial tiers, monitoring systems capable of tracking performance, and political leadership willing to absorb the costs of genuine implementation.
Civilian governments in Pakistan have consistently chosen the path of legislative symbolism over institutional delivery. Breaking this pattern requires both domestic political change and a shift in how international partners, including the United Kingdom, structure their engagement. External funding and technical assistance must be directed toward enforcement infrastructure, civil society accountability mechanisms, and governance capacity, not simply toward the production of more legislation.
The measure of progress on gender rights in Pakistan will not be found in statute books. It will be found in whether a woman in rural Sindh can file a harassment complaint and expect it to be investigated, whether a survivor of domestic violence in Baluchistan can access a functioning protection mechanism, and whether the governments elected to serve her are held accountable when they fail. That is the standard against which civilian governance must be judged, and it is the standard that has not yet been met.
Ms Tamseel Aqdas is an Assistant Researcher at London Dialogue.
Ms Tamseel Aqdas
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