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Asma Jahangir is a Pakistani lawyer and the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of religion. The foreign correspondent of the year, Christina Lamb, met her in Lahore to discuss taking on mullahs, generals and feudal lords 

By the side of the First Women Bank on Lahore’s Liberty Market, a flight of stone steps leads to an unmarked plywood door. Inside, among piles of dusty books and manila files, only two lurking gunmen and a grey and white mural of beseeching women give any clue that this is no ordinary law office.

These are the chambers of Pakistan’s best-known human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir. A tiny woman wrapped in a big cardigan, her hands flutter like birds, often reaching for a cigarette, and her smile is warm and mischievous.

The feisty 55-year-old has led fights against all the most powerful sectors of Pakistan, taking on mullahs, generals and feudal lords, in her mission to protect the rights of women and religious minorities and end bonded labour. Most recently she has campaigned to rescue those ‘disappeared’ by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies under the guise of the War on Terror.

She’s often the only woman among the black and white suited lawyers protesting against President Pervez Musharraf – the third military ruler she has taken on.

Jahangir’s work has won her international acclaim. Shelves are crammed with awards presented to her from bodies ranging from the UK’s West Midlands police to the Azerbaijan Supreme Court. As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion, she travels the world exposing persecution of religious minorities. At home it has long been more complicated. The gunmen by the door are because of constant death threats. Nine years ago one of her clients was shot dead just outside by a gunman hired by the girl’s own mother. Jahangir has been locked up, vilified and described by Musharraf as “unbalanced”. When he declared a state of emergency last November and suspended the Supreme Court, she was placed under house arrest.

But these days, to most Pakistanis, she is a hero. In February she was the joint winner in Enter the PM, a reality TV show to find a people’s Prime Minister. “Typical Pakistan, even a TV show can’t come up with a proper result,” she laughs. “I think they were frightened to let me win.”

Just what she is taking on is clear from a framed front page from the International Herald Tribune on the wall of her office with the headline ‘Court in Pakistan Rules that Love Conquers All’.

Dated 11 March 1997, it tells the story of Jahangir’s long battle to enable 22-year-old Saima Waheed to stay with the husband she had married for love. The girl had fled to Jahangir’s women’s shelter in Lahore after her parents tried to declare her marriage invalid and had her husband locked up. “For a year and a half we had threats to our office and were demonised in the press,” she recalls. A group of mullahs led out a procession carrying what was supposed to be Jahangir’s dead body and symbolically burying it.

“I thought this is 1997 – a woman of 22 should be able to marry who she likes,” says Jahangir. “Why should that throw up accusations that I’m destroying the moral fabric of society?”

Such battles are all in a day’s work for Jahangir, who set up Pakistan’s first female law practice. She was inspired to enter law by her father Malik Jilani, who quit a comfortable civil service job in protest after Pakistan’s first military coup in 1958. His resignation ended what she describes as an idyllic childhood in the small town of Sahiwal, where they had their own horse and carriage and the only film projector in the district.

The general retaliated by confiscating family property and jailing him. “Hordes of police came in the middle of the night with torches,” she recalls. “It was terrifying.”

It was the first of a succession of arrests. “Every time my father went off to jail, he said to me, ‘I am doing this so you can live in a freer country’.” Jahangir and her mother spent much of their time in court challenging detention orders. “I was very impressed by the judges wearing wigs, the lawyers, the legal arguments…,” she recalls.

So it was no surprise when she decided to enter the law, something then almost unheard of for women. In 1980 she and her sister Hina Jilani set up Pakistan’s first all-women law practice.

“The first obstacle was to convince my own family that I needed to work,” she said. “Then to find the women. My sister was working in another law practice so wasn’t sure. Another woman lawyer was sitting at home looking after two children.” The next problem was finding cases. “That’s how we found our niche – women in jail – which we took on free.”

The opening of Jahangir’s firm coincided with the highly conservative military rule of General Zia ul-Haq who in 1977 had ousted Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir. Zia became a hero in Washington for his backing of the US against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

But back home he launched an Islamisation campaign, introducing a series of laws, known as the Hudood Ordinances, which discriminated against women. Sex outside marriage (known as Zina) was made an offence punishable by 10 years in jail and public whippings. To prove rape, women had to produce four male witnesses, which was almost impossible. Instead, victims were often charged with adultery and imprisoned or flogged.

“There was such prejudice against these victims,” says Jahangir. “People were not taking up their cases because they felt they were promiscuous women who deserved what they got. Even the judges discouraged us, asking ‘can’t you find better clients?’ What did they mean, murderers?”

After five years of struggle the turning point came with the case of Shahnaz Masih, a Christian who had escaped an abusive marriage to remarry and was arrested under Hudood. Jahangir managed to get her off and was then inundated by clients from the woman’s village.

In 1986, she helped establish the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which took on blasphemy cases filed against Ahmadis, a heterodox Muslim sect, and Christians. A single accusation could result in execution.

One day she went to see a Christian woman who had been raped by the owner of a brick kiln. “When I got there I saw something far worse was going on.”

Jahangir discovered most of the brickmakers were bonded labourers who had been advanced money by their employers at rates so extortionate that they were forced to borrow more to repay or pledge their own children.

She spent five months studying the workers’ lives and teaching them how to file cases. “They couldn’t read and we made these forms with pictures,” she recalls. “Apple meant your name, banana father.” Jahangir was astonished at how going to court empowered these people. “I remember one woman who did not dare to stand up to her employer yet stood up in court and said: ‘I’d rather my five children die of starvation than take the humiliation I’ve taken all my life. Even a cat has a better life than us, for a cat can go where it wants’.”

As a result of Jahangir’s work, bonded labour in brick kilns has been largely outlawed. But still today seven out of 10 women in Pakistan are unable to read, and other horrors continue such as honour killings and so-called stove burnings – where in-laws set fire to a woman after getting the dowry. Survivors often end up in her shelter with horrific burns.

What particularly angers her is what she sees as the excuse of religion for criminal acts or political ends. “Honour killings are not a specifically Islamic tradition,” she argues. “They are just a bad tradition that must be stopped.”

“Islam is no more violent or fanatical than any other religion,” she continues. “It’s just that many Muslim countries have politicised religion for the benefit of the rulers.”

“Look how selectively Sharia law is applied here,” she points out. “When Zia started his Islamisation, it was aimed at women, non-Muslims and the poor. It is never invoked against the elite.”

Delivering the Oxford Amnesty lecture in February, she criticised democratic governments such as the US, which she says “have justified their flexible approach to human rights on the plea that short-term deviations are necessary to combat international terrorism”. Jahangir believes that Musharraf has copied America’s system of extraordinary rendition and used intelligence agencies to round up anyone deemed a political threat and detains them inside secret Guantanamo Bay-style camps.

More than 400 people are missing. One reason Musharraf suspended the Supreme Court was its rulings in Jahangir’s cases that the agencies must produce these people. The chief justice remains under house arrest as do a number of prominent lawyers such as Aitzaz Ahsan, President of the Bar Council.

“Lawyers are horribly depressed,” says Jahangir. Usually one of life’s optimists, she admits she found it difficult to get out of bed after the killing of Benazir Bhutto in December. “I’ve never felt so bleak,” she says. “What sort of country are we leaving to our children?”

“We as a people are completely disempowered,” she adds. “They can lock up half the judiciary and get away with it, have people tortured and not be accountable, have an ex-prime minister killed then hose down the scene of the crime.”

Yet her biggest disappointment lies elsewhere. “The Americans have been constant protectors of dictatorship in Pakistan,” she says. “How can you fight an army that’s shown only cruelty to its people when it’s backed by the world’s greatest superpower?”

Somehow you know she has no intention of giving up.