Girls’s Day March Banned In Lahore Over “Controversial Banners”

“It is a violation of our rights,” Aurat March Organiser (Picture from Aurat March Multan 2022)

Lahore:

Authorities in Pakistan’s jap metropolis of Lahore have refused permission for a rally to mark Worldwide Girls’s Day, which often meets a fierce backlash within the conservative, patriarchal nation.

Marches have been held in main cities throughout Pakistan since 2018 to deliver consideration to girls’s rights.

Lahore metropolis authorities cited the “controversial playing cards and banners” generally displayed by members within the march and safety issues as causes behind the choice, which had been specified by a notification to march organisers late Friday.

Counter-protests dubbed “Haya (modesty)” marches are generally staged by non secular teams to name for the preservation of Islamic values.

“It is a violation of our rights. This raises questions concerning the state’s capacity to handle the proper to freedom of meeting for each teams,” Hiba Akbar, an organiser for Aurat (girls’s) March Lahore, instructed AFP.

Lahore authorities have allowed this 12 months’s Haya March to be held regardless of the ban on the Aurat March.

Organisers of the Aurat March in Pakistan have regularly needed to resort to authorized motion to counter makes an attempt to ban it.

The Aurat March rallies have courted controversy due to banners and placards waved by members that elevate topics reminiscent of divorce, sexual harassment and menstruation.

Organisers and members have been accused of selling Western, liberal values and disrespecting non secular and cultural sensitivities.

A lot of Pakistani society operates underneath a strict code of “honour”, systemising the oppression of girls in issues reminiscent of the proper to decide on who to marry, reproductive rights and even the proper to an schooling.

Lots of of girls are killed by males in Pakistan annually over “honour”.

Rights group Amnesty Worldwide stated the Lahore choice “quantities to an illegal and pointless restriction of the proper to meeting”.

Authorities within the capital Islamabad, citing safety issues, have relegated the Aurat March to a metropolis park the place a girl was gang raped in February.

“We’re a feminist motion, we won’t be in parks however moderately on the streets,” an announcement by march organisers there stated.

In 2020, teams of hardline Islamist males turned up in vans and hurled stones at girls collaborating within the Aurat March.

Girls have lengthy fought for fundamental rights in Pakistan, the place activists say males commit “pervasive and intractable” violence in opposition to them.

(Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)