Asia

This paper discusses the trends of the superior courts on succession and inheritance rights available to women in Pakistan. While analysing some relevant landmark judgements from independence to 1992, the changes and development in the law regarding succession and inheritance over a much longer period of time have been traced.
This article highlight some impacts of a project initiated in Pakistan’s Sindh province, in 2008, to distribute 91,000 hectares of cultivable state land to 80,000 poor and landless peasants, many of them women. Indeed, 21,000 hectares of land to be distributed during the project’s second year is to be reserved for women, who are traditionally left out of land reform schemes and have less opportunities to own land.

This paper will attempt to examine the changing nuances of women's economic positioning in rural Sindh and probe the possibility of land ownership as a means of empowerment, while exploring the local discourse around it.

This is a comprehensive analysis of the role of customary practices in determining the space, rights and self-actualization of women in Pakistan. It looks into the outcome of the historical experience of colonization and its impact on statutory law, the local structures of power and the cultural specificity of the region, which produces the 'living law' of the country.

Research Study on Customs and Practices Prevailing in South Punjab Regarding Women's Right of Inheritance. The research explores the scope and trends in relation to women’s right to inheritance and links of women’s ownership of property and inheritance rights and their experience of domestic violence.

This paper attempts to find an association between the absence of federal and provincial laws in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan and denial of land ownership rights to women.  It discusses various forms of collective and individual land ownership keeping in view features of Pukhtun culture affecting the status of women. It shall also compare land ownership of Pukhtun women in NWFP where the law allows women to inherit and own property with the absence of landownership of women in tribal areas.

This paper explores statistically the implications of the shift from communal to individualized tenure on the distribution of land and schooling between sons and daughters in matrilineal societies, based on a Sumatra case study. The inheritance system is evolving from a strictly matrilineal system to a more egalitarian system in which sons and daughters inherit the type of land that is more intensive in their own work effort. While gender bias is either non-existent or small in land inheritance, daughters tend to be disadvantaged with respect to schooling.

This paper was presented at the International Conference on Land and Resource Tenure, Jakarta, 11-13 October 2004. The writer was part of a panel of women speaking on the theme of women and tenurial rights. For further information see www.landtenure.net, and link below.

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