Farzana Bari


Farzana Bari is a Pakistani feminist, human rights activist and academic who served as the director of the Gender Studies Department at Quaid-e-Azam University.

Biography

Farzana Bari also served as a senior leader of Awami Workers Party and is a columnist for The Express Tribune and Daily Times Pakistan.
Farzana Bari promotes secularism and liberalism in Pakistan. She militates against the male-dominated system of jirgas and pleads in favor of looser Islamic rules regarding women's rights in Pakistan.
In January 2014, she militated to reopen the Kohistan dancing video case where she claimed that the girls appearing in the video were then murdered after dancing at a wedding. In August 2015, she spoke up about the 300 children sex slaves in Hussain Khan Wala Village forced to do sex videos from 2006 to 2014. In May 2016, she strongly opposed the Islamic council's decision to make it legal for husbands to "slightly" beat up their wives, calling the council "decadent".
In October 2016, as the National Assembly of Pakistan outlawed honor killing, Farzana Bari warned that this law could be bypassed as a judge has to decide first and foremost if a homicide is indeed a case of honor killing or not.

Articles