President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Saturday said the government is addressing issues pertaining to discriminatory laws against women, and they appealed to political parties to join hands and rise above partisan politics to extricate women from the agony of discriminatory laws.In their separate messages on the occasion of International Women's Day, falling on March 8, they congratulated the women of the world in general and of Pakistan in particular and saluted them for their struggle for emancipation and putting an end to discrimination.
Zardari: The president urged parliamentarians to revisit the laws discriminatory to women and review them. The government felt a special responsibility towards women-related issues and considered the promotion of women's rights as a moral, political and religious obligation, he said. The president said women the world over and in Pakistan had been subjected to varying degrees of discrimination, exploitation and violence. "It is simply the result of prejudice. This situation must change; it will," he said. Zardari said Pakistan had the distinction of having Benazir Bhutto as the first woman elected as prime minister of an Islamic nation. He said for the first time the country now had a woman as the speaker of the National Assembly. "These are distinctions of which the women of Pakistan, indeed all of us, can genuinely feel proud," he said. President Zardari said during the two tenures of Benazir Bhutto's government, a trend was set in gender equality and protection of women from violence.
He said the introduction of the Benazir Income Support Programme, with a focus on women, was a step in the direction of empowering women of the country and that it would expand into a social action programme largely for the benefit of women in the rural area.
PM Gilani: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said the government accorded high priority to the development and empowerment of women, and was addressing issues pertaining to discriminatory laws, introducing new legislation, and earnestly stepping up its efforts to eliminate abuse of women in all its forms, with the active involvement of women parliamentarians, civil society organisations and NGOs. "These prejudices persist in every country as a pervasive violation of human rights and a major impediment to achieving gender equality. Zero tolerance of violation against women is the target of this government," Gilani said.
He reiterated the government's commitment of enabling women to play their due role in the socio-economic development of Pakistan, in line with the vision of Benazir Bhutto. The prime minister said, "No nation can afford to ignore women as they form almost fifty percent of the world's population." The prime minister said he was confident that "if we safeguard the rights and acknowledge the contribution of women in our development agenda, we can make Pakistan a peaceful and a prosperous country".