The InterDependent

Asma Jahangir launched her first legal battle when she was just 20 years old, without ever going to law school. It was 1972, and the Pakistani government of then-President Zulifkae Ali Bhutto had just detained Jahangir’s father, a member of the political opposition. Asma picked up a law textbook, filed a petition to the Supreme Court for his release, and, 10 years later, found out that she’d won. “I was really not a human rights activist,” recalls the now-famous lawyer. “I was my father’s daughter.”

Today, Jahangir is one of the world’s most celebrated human rights lawyers. When she sat down for an interview late on a Thursday afternoon last November in midtown Manhattan, Jahangir—who is better known to the world just as Asma—had come to New York to receive the Leo Nevas prize for her service as a UN special rapporteur on both Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Killings, and Freedom of Religion or Belief. Through her work and her feisty public persona, Asma is widely credited with drawing attention to the most disenfranchised and marginalized populations in the world—political correctness be damned.

For Jahangir, the Nevas award tops a long career as one of Pakistan’s top human rights defenders. She was elected twice as chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which she cofounded, and she finished her tenure as the president of the Pakistani Supreme Court Bar Association late last year. She has also worked as a defense lawyer for decades, and started the Pakistani Women’s Action Forum, which took part in antigovernment protests.

“Asma is not the sort of human rights defender who dabbles in theory or diplomacy,” Philip Alston, an NYU professor who is the current rapporteur, wrote in an email. “She speaks from the position of one who has been on the front lines, who has defied power and stood up for principle, and who is deeply suspicious of power and prestige.”

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Jahangir’s story begins with her first court case in 1972, but as she tells the story, it wasn’t until a decade later that she thought of herself as a human rights activist. “[In] the 1980s, [I] began to look at the rights of religious minorities, the rights of women, the rights of children, and realize that until these disempowered groups are not empowered, there can be no energetic democracy in Pakistan,” she said in a speech at the Leo Nevas gala.

In 1980, Asma started her own law practice with her sister, Hina Jilani, working on cases that dealt primarily with the rights of women, children, and minorities. At the time, Pakistan’s government was taking a hard line against women's rights and religious freedoms, including imposing restrictions on education, the right to fair trials, and freedom of expression, under the auspices of conservative Islamic law. The sisters’ circle of bright, accomplished women was not happy at all with the direction their country was headed. There was no question, says Asma, about how to express their discontent. They took to the streets.

“Islamization targeted women and minorities because they were easy targets,” Asma recalled. “They were mistaken with women.…Women would go out in the streets. Nearly every month, we would get beaten up. We suffered imprisonment and house arrest, but that did not deter us. We were looking for something better; we wanted a new system.” This outlook gained Jahangir a reputation as one of the most fiercely committed activists in the human rights community. In Pakistan, hers is a household name.

Not long after the protests began, Asma cofounded Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission. She has worked for decades since as an attorney in the legal aid cell she runs with her sister, Hina Jilani. Among her best-known cases was that of Safia Bibi, a blind 13-year-old who in 1983 was raped and became pregnant. Safia was subsequently jailed, flogged, and fined for committing the crime of zina, or fornication, under Zia ul Haq’s regime. Asma defended Safia in her appeal and, with the help of the protest movement, eventually overturned the verdict.

Ali Dayan Hasan, the current director for Human Rights Watch in Pakistan, first heard about Asma when he was a teenager. His parents would talk at home about how brave she was to protest. Inspired by her courage, Hasan went on to intern at her legal aid offices during his summers off in college. “She is remarkable,” he recalls. “She did not patronize; she did not try to pull rank.”

Such controversial work won Asma immense respect, in particular from Pakistan’s legal community. In November, Asma ended a year-long stint as the president of the Pakistan Bar, and her practice remains the go-to place for women, children, and victims of discrimination. It also won her and her sister some major detractors. Both have received numerous death threats, and two attempts have been made on Asma’s life.

“She was incessantly under threat from extremist groups that acted at the behest of the military or the ISI,” says Hasan, recalling how much was at stake when Asma and her colleagues challenged the authorities in the 1990s. “Once, she was heading to court and a mob attacked her car. But she was immensely calm under the greatest pressure. I recall it clearly. A hallmark of how she carries herself is how calm she was able to remain.”

Asma has also been arrested for her work at home. When then-President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in 2007, Asma was put under house arrest for 90 days after leading a march of over 500 lawyers, human rights activists, and opposition politicians.

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By 2000, Asma’s work had caught the attention of the international community, and she was selected as the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Killings, which position she held for four years. In this position, Asma wanted to give a voice to those whom no one else dared defend.

“As Special Rapporteur, she pushed the envelope in a variety of directions,” says Philip Alston, who first met Asma in 1984 in Pakistan and has worked closely with her since. “She placed great emphasis on the campaign to label ‘honor killings’ as extrajudicial executions, despite the resistance of many governments, not least her own. She pushed hard to address the killing of gay and lesbian activists as extrajudicial executions, and she became a strong spokesperson against the use of the death penalty.”

Asma followed her rapporteur role with a six-year appointment as the Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion and Belief, where she argued effectively to broaden the mandate of that post to include violence against women. She continued to pay attention to the situation of sexual minorities—possibly the last marginalized group to receive proper attention from institutions like the UN, and one that is discriminated against in failed states and first-world countries alike.

That work was not easy, says Heiner Bielefeldt, her successor and a professor of human rights at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. “[Homosexuality] is one of the most absolute taboo topics when it comes to religion. Mentioning those topics in a UN report means you really risk ending up in some trouble. It really stirs a lot of opposition.”

"There's a fight in recognizing gays and lesbians. Every country that does not wish to be associated with gays and lesbians has told me there are no gays and no lesbians in their country,” explained Asma at the awards dinner. “In Pakistan, they told me they had no gays and lesbians. I was able to tell them of several gays that I knew of, some in very high government positions."

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The question of LGBT rights in many ways sums up Asma’s priorities: Fight for the underdog. She puts human rights first—before the precepts of any religion, tradition, or custom. She’s not afraid to make the powers-that-be very, very uncomfortable.

“She’s a small woman, almost fragile looking,” says Bielefeldt, who “only hopes” to live up to her standards. But Jahangir’s slight frame and unassuming demeanor belie her intellectual ferocity. “She used very clear words in emphasizing that religion cannot be invoked legitimately to curtail women’s rights, and that freedom of religion as a human right cannot be played off in an antagonistic sense in reducing equality of men and women.”

Asma’s tendency not to sugarcoat may not, as Alston points out, be the most diplomatic approach. But it serves as an inspiration for a new generation of human rights activists who have grown up rejecting traditional ideas about how women—even Muslim women from Pakistan—ought to behave. Now, Asma is just one of many who are frustrated with the lack of progress.

“There’s a tendency to be overly effusive [at awards ceremonies],” recalled Karen Woodin Rodriguez, who was this year’s recipient of the Leo Nevas Youth Prize. “But she made it clear that the human rights situation has not changed as much as she’d like and there’s still a lot of work to be done. She said she was sad that things hadn’t improved.”

Asma has received plenty of prizes and recognition, including the Millennium Peace Prize, which was awarded to her and her sister in 2000, but the fight for universal human rights is far from over. “Frankly, [recognition] puts more burden on me to continue even more vigorously to defend human rights,” she told me after the awards ceremony.

Today, Asma is back in Pakistan working as a lawyer. Being back home, says Asma, is ultimately more gratifying—and challenging—than the UN work she did in the past, although she enjoyed that, too. “These are two different worlds in terms of working conditions,” she says. “It’s the satisfaction I get when working in Pakistan with people I know, with people who have the same language and outlook as I do. We share a history together.”

Asma Jahangir was the 2011 recipient of the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA) Leo Nevas Human Rights Task Force Award. The award, which has bee presented annually since 2007, is the highest honor of the Leo Nevas Human Rights Program, an initiative of UNA-USA that promotes human rights as an essential component of U.S. policy at the United Nations.