LAHORE:A man who divorced his wife by email, never informed the union council and later said he had been joking has lost his case in the Lahore High Court (LHC), which held that a husband cannot use his own default to keep a woman’s marital status in doubt and asked Parliament to close the gap in the law.
Justice Anwaar Hussain dismissed a petition by Raheel Ahmad against a divorce effectiveness certificate that the union council issued in his wife’s favour on January 17 this year. The judgment is to be sent to the federal law secretary and circulated to family courts across Punjab.
The couple had been living in England when differences arose. The wife told the courts that her husband communicated the divorce to her by email on August 5, 2024. She then sued in a family court for maintenance, her dower and a declaration that she was divorced.
The husband appeared through his father and filed a written reply, then stopped attending and was proceeded against in his absence. In April 2025 the family court awarded maintenance and dower but declined to rule on the divorce, saying it lacked jurisdiction, and sent the wife to the union council. The council issued the certificate.
Before the High Court he raised three objections. He had never given the chairman the notice required by Section 7 of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, 1961. He had been denied a chance to take part in reconciliation. And the divorce, he said, had been pronounced jokingly.
The judge rejected each. The duty to give notice lies on the husband, he held, but nothing in Section 7 stops a wife from bringing a divorce already pronounced to the chairman’s attention. To hold otherwise would hand the husband a veto over the process and turn a legal obligation into a procedural weapon.
On the complaint of no hearing, the court noted that the council had issued notices, one of which was received by the same father who had represented him in the family court. The record, it said, showed opportunity followed by avoidance.
The joke plea was described as an afterthought. Section 7 does contain a proviso under which a divorce pronounced jokingly, in anger or under duress is ineffective, but it applies only where the parties follow Fiqah-i-Jafria. The husband’s counsel could not establish that they did.
The family court did not escape criticism. By refusing to decide whether a divorce had in fact taken place, the judge found, it had abdicated its jurisdiction. “A woman cannot be left suspended between wife and divorcee,” he observed.
He closed with a message to legislators. The case, he wrote, exposed a gap capable of creating avoidable uncertainty, and Parliament should consider amending Section 7 to recognise a wife’s right to report a divorce communicated to her, without relieving the husband of his own duty.
The practical effect reaches well beyond one couple. Marriages conducted across borders are now ended by email and text message, often by husbands living abroad. A wife who receives such a message but no paperwork can neither remarry nor settle her claims. The ruling gives her a route to a certificate that does not depend on the man who sent it.
The court has shown the same impatience with delay in family matters before, as when it ordered three children returned to their mother last month.
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