ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani lawmakers passed amendments to the country's rape laws Wednesday, ditching the death penalty for extramarital sex and revising a clause on making victims produce four witnesses to prove rape cases.
International and local calls for change intensified after the 2002 gang-rape of a woman, Mukhtar Mai, who was assaulted after a tribal council in her eastern Punjab village ordered the rape as punishment for her brother's alleged affair with a woman of a higher caste.
The amendments enraged Islamic fundamentalists, but won cautious support from human-rights activists, who wanted the controversial laws scrapped.
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf praised lawmakers for approving the amendments and criticized Islamic fundamentalists for their "unnecessary" opposition and claims that his government was acting against Islam.
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"I have taken a firm decision to change these unjust rape laws as it was necessary to amend them to protect women," Musharraf said in a televised address to the nation.
Pakistan's late military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, introduced the laws in 1979 to appease Islamic fundamentalist political groups opposed to the secularization of Pakistani society.
Human-rights activists and moderates have long condemned the laws for punishing — instead of protecting — rape victims by placing the burden of proof on them and providing safeguards for their attackers, such as requiring four eyewitnesses to bring rape charges.
The amendments were passed by a majority of the 342-member National Assembly. Musharraf urged the government-run Senate to approve the measures within days.
"We reject it," Maulana Fazlur Rahman, a top Islamist opposition leader, told reporters after the vote, which he described as a "dark day" in Pakistan's parliamentary history.
The amendments include dropping the death penalty and flogging for people convicted of having consensual sex outside marriage and giving judges discretion to try rape cases in a criminal rather than Islamic court. Strict Islamic law dictates that a woman claiming rape must produce four witnesses, making a trial almost impossible.
Pro-Islamic lawmakers stormed out of the National Assembly Wednesday in protest of the new legislation.
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