Pakistan: SC upholds killer’s death sentence after marriage refusal

Pakistan’s Supreme Court in Islamabad on October 13, 2026 rejected Muhammad Kamran’s request to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. The man was convicted of murdering a woman after she and her family refused to accept his marriage proposal, Dawn reports.

The case was heard by a three-judge bench comprising Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar, Salahuddin Panhwar and Ishtiaq Ibrahim. In a nine-page ruling authored by Justice Kakar, the court criticized patriarchal customs and gender-based violence.

Kamran spent about 15 years on death row. The court stressed that serving 14 or 15 years does not make a convict equivalent to someone who was initially sentenced to life imprisonment: the difference lies in the sentence handed down by the court, not merely in the number of years behind bars.

The court noted that marriage is a voluntary union requiring the free consent of both parties. The ruling states that in patriarchal systems, men sometimes believe they are entitled to choose a woman and claim her regardless of her will, perceiving refusal as an attack on their own “honor.”

The bench mentioned the customs of ghag, suara and watta-satta, under which decisions about a woman’s marriage may be made by others. In particular, ghag involves a man unilaterally declaring a woman to be his bride without her consent; Pakistan criminalized this practice under a 2013 law of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The court stressed that an attempt to portray a woman’s lawful refusal as provocation or a mitigating circumstance is unacceptable. It also recalled that Pakistan is a party to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Article 16 of which obliges states to ensure women’s right to freely choose a spouse and enter into marriage only with their full and free consent.