Asma Jahangir

Jahangir was born and raised in Lahore into a prosperous, politically active Urdu-speaking Muhajir family of Kakazai Pashtun origins. Her father, Malik Ghulam Jilani, was a civil servant who entered politics on retirement and was repeatedly jailed or held under house arrest for opposing military dictatorships, among them for denouncing the government's conduct in what is now Bangladesh; her mother, Begum Sabiha Jilani, was educated at Forman Christian College and ran her own clothing business. Jahangir protested against her father's detention as a schoolgirl, took her BA at Kinnaird College and her LLB at Punjab University Law College in 1978, and was called to the Lahore High Court in 1980 and the Supreme Court in 1982. ¹

In the 1980s Jahangir became a pro-democracy activist and was jailed in 1983 for taking part in the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy against the Zia-ul-Haq regime. With her sister Hina Jilani she set up the AGHS Legal Aid Cell in Lahore in 1986, Pakistan's first free legal aid centre, which also runs the Dastak shelter for women; in 1987 she co-founded the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, serving as its secretary-general and then, from 1993, its chairperson. She spent her career defending the rights of women, children and religious minorities, was a staunch critic of the Hudood Ordinances and the blasphemy laws enacted under Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization programme, campaigned against bonded labour, child labour and capital punishment, and took cases for women who had married by choice against rulings that required a guardian's consent. She was detained again under the 2007 emergency declared by Pervez Musharraf, played a prominent part in the Lawyers' Movement, and in 2017 became the first Pakistani to deliver the Amartya Sen Lecture at the London School of Economics, calling for a counter-narrative of liberal politics against religious intolerance. ^{1 2}

Jahangir died in hospital at Lahore on 11 February 2018, aged 66, of a brain haemorrhage following a stroke. She had received, among many honours, the Martin Ennals Award (1995), the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1995), the Four Freedoms Award for freedom of worship (2010), the North–South Prize (2012), Pakistan's Hilal-i-Imtiaz and — posthumously in 2018 — the Nishan-e-Imtiaz and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights. The Guardian described her as having "towered over Pakistan's human rights war" for almost four decades; The New Yorker called her Pakistan's "most visible and celebrated — as well as most vilified — human-rights lawyer". ^{1 2}

Her faith is recorded as unknown, because no source names an affiliation for her. The English article makes no statement of her own religion anywhere: the religion content of her biography is professional — her UN rapporteurship was on freedom of religion or belief, an office, not an affiliation — together with descriptions of her cause, as when William Dalrymple wrote that she spent her professional life "fighting for a secular civil society", a description of her work rather than an attestation of personal unbelief. The Arabic article's infobox carries no religion value and its text is silent; the Urdu article is a translation of the English one; her categories file her by profession and ethnicity; and Wikidata carries no religion value at all. ^{1 2 3 4}

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