First violated, then penalised

It sounds bizarre that even in this age a woman, who was gang-raped, has become the victim of Islamic law and faces 200 lashes in the desert kingdom called Saudi Arabia for misdemeanor.

The facts that resulted in a Saudi court's judgment, signed by a judge who abides by the Shariat law, are shocking. Her offence -- meeting an ex-boyfriend alone in a car in 2006, apparently to retrieve her photographs from him since she was about to marry another man.

The woman's former boyfriend, who was not one of the rapists, was sitting alone with her when a group of seven men abducted her and raped her 14 times. She was charged with violating Saudi Arabia's rigid gender-segregation law, and the boyfriend was himself sentenced to 90 lashes.

The couple's attackers were originally sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 months to five years, but had their sentences increased to 2--9 years this week.

No lashes for them. The victim's attorney, Abdulrahman al-Lahim, contested the rapists' sentence, contending there is a fatwa or edict under Islamic law that considers such crimes Hiraba (sinful violent crime), and the punishment should be death.

"After a year, the preliminary court increased the punishment to 2--9 years for the defendants," the attorney said. However he was shocked that the judges also increased the victim's sentence to six months in prison and 200 lashes.

When the rape victim's lawyer sought leniency to her, the court became harsher and ordered that she be lashed 200 times. Her offence was that she attempted to 'aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media'.

The judges also scrapped lawyer al-Lahim's license to practice law. The Saudi penal code, which operates according to a strict interpretation of Sharia law, forbids a woman to be alone with a man who is not her husband or a relative.

Closer home, neighboring Pakistan also had over 1,000 female prisoners facing rape-related charges under Islamic law. General Pervez Musharraf ordered their release three years ago as the military ruler wanted to review a plethora of laws like the Hudood ordinances that were anti-women.

The laws required a woman who claimed she was raped to produce four pious male witnesses. Otherwise, she would be charged with adultery -- an offense that could carry a death sentence by stoning.

The ordinances had been used as a weapon against women who defy marriage choices made by their families. Over 6,000 women prisoners in Pakistan were in fact victims of rape, said Javed Iqbal Burki, a lawyer with Pakistan's Human Rights Commission.