LAHORE: The parents exhausted by the disobedience and alleged criminal conduct of their children have begun approaching the courts, submitting deeds of disownment severing ties with their sons alongside their petitions.
According to sources, in petitions filed against alleged harassment by police, parents are taking the position that they have already disowned their son for his disobedience and for adopting a life of crime, and that they therefore have no connection with any of his words or actions.
Parents have requested the court that, following their severance of ties with the son, police be restrained from entering their homes and harassing them.
Deeds of disownment have also been attached to the petitions as supporting documents.
Sessions courts have restrained police from harassing the parents in approximately a dozen such petitions.
The petitions address a specific and long-documented policing practice. Where an accused person absconds and cannot be located, investigating officers frequently direct pressure toward the family — through repeated visits to the residence, questioning of relatives, and in some accounts the detention of family members — as a means of compelling the absconder to surrender.
The practice has no lawful basis. Pakistani criminal law is founded on individual responsibility: a person may be arrested only where there exists reasonable suspicion of that person’s own involvement in an offence. No provision permits the detention, harassment or coercion of relatives as a substitute for, or means of securing, the arrest of an accused.
A deed of disownment, or aaq nama, is a document by which parents publicly renounce their relationship with a child. Its principal recognised legal effect concerns inheritance and property, and even there its operation is limited — under Islamic law as applied in Pakistan, a disownment deed does not by itself extinguish the rights of inheritance that vest under the law of succession.
As a matter of criminal law, the deed has no bearing whatsoever on the liability of either party. It cannot make a person less responsible for his own offences, nor can it make parents more or less liable for the acts of an adult child, since they were never liable in the first place.
What the document appears to be serving in these petitions is an evidentiary and demonstrative function rather than a legal one. It provides tangible material with which parents can establish before a court that they have no continuing connection with their son, no knowledge of his whereabouts, and no capacity to produce him — thereby removing whatever justification police may have advanced for sustained attention to the household.
The phenomenon reflects a form of distress that reaches beyond the legal question. Parents resorting to a formal instrument of renunciation against their own children are describing a breakdown that is familial before it is legal, and the deed is in part an expression of exhaustion.
That approximately a dozen such petitions have come before the sessions courts suggests a pattern rather than an isolated occurrence, and points to a category of citizens who are neither accused of any offence nor able to secure relief through ordinary complaint channels.
The orders restraining police from harassment are protective in nature, directing law enforcement to confine its activity to lawful investigative methods. Such orders do not impede the pursuit of the accused; they restrict only the improper targeting of persons against whom no allegation exists.
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