THE CHALLENGE IN writing about rights in the Pakistani context is to describe the specificity of their articulation without making exaggerated claims about their distribution.

Such caution should not be confused for rights pessimism; it would be difficult to insist that rights on the books are equivalent to rights in practice anywhere. In Pakistan, though, there are reasons for addi­tional caution—the nature of legal hybridity is such that significant legal domains are insulated from fundamental rights protection.

A major and important feature of the rights guaranteed in the 1973 Constitution is that each right is matched with an expanse of fairly wide limitations. This chapter describes the common law principles forged for interpreting these limitations clauses. Following that, are a brief overview the rights accorded in the 1973 Constitution along with a description of some of the fractures of the political terrain that influ­enced an ambivalence into the expression of these rights.

Detailed study of the right against gender discrimination and the right to be detained under law illustrate this inheritance as do the multiple metamorphoses enacted by constitutional suspension as well as other milestones of political development in Pakistan. In reference to gender discrimination the domains of education and employment evidence a slow building response of redress and protection from the higher judiciary. Although limited in impact to women in relatively privileged positions, this regime of law presents a stark contrast to the operations of personal law and Islamic criminal law, which continue to yield discriminatory effects for women, as discussed extensively in Chapter 8.

The regime of preventive detention and its constitutional safeguards have been described here as it is amongst the sites where state power to curtail the personal liberty of citizens is least fettered. The allowance for preventive detention is a carry-over from colonial rule incorporated into every constitutional document framed in the post-colonial period; used initially to suppress regional grievances and broadly constrain opposition during both civilian and military rule, its more recent uses are mostly in aid of controlling terrorism. Inspired by the trans-national reframing of preventive detention regimes during the waging of the seemingly-interminable war on terror post-9/11, the outright efface­ment of rights to be detained in accordance with constitutional safe­guards is reflected in the plight of missing persons in Pakistan.

I.