Counting What the Court Has Named

A recent judgment of the Supreme Court of Pakistan has brought the term femicide directly into the country’s highest judicial forum.

In Criminal Review Petition No. 89 of 2025, heard on 4 June 2026 by a three-member bench, the Court turned, before concluding its judgment, to what it described as the “grave and growing concern” of increasing instances of femicide. Its reasoning is significant: the killing of a woman, the Court observed, is rarely an isolated or spontaneous act. Rather, it may represent the lethal culmination of a systematic and gender-motivated continuum of violence.

In reaching this observation, the Court drew on the Statistical Framework for Measuring the Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls, jointly developed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UN Women. The Court noted that the largest category of femicide victims comprises women intentionally killed by current or former intimate partners, and referred to global estimates showing that approximately 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or other family members in 2024. It also drew attention to patterns of violence that can precede lethal escalation, including coercive control, stalking and psychological abuse.

The significance for Pakistan extends beyond the judgment itself. The same Statistical Framework is now being piloted in the country.

Endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission in March 2022 and aligned with the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes, the framework provides countries with a common statistical approach to identifying and measuring gender-related killings of women and girls. In Pakistan, the pilot is being taken forward through the UN Women Knowledge and Partnerships Centre in the Republic of Korea and the UNODC-KOSTAT Centre of Excellence for Statistics on Crime and Criminal Justice in Asia and the Pacific, with the Ministry of Human Rights as the Government’s focal entity and in partnership with UNFPA.

Initial consultations held from 3 to 9 September 2026 brought together federal and provincial institutions involved in producing, using and interpreting data on violence against women and homicide. Provincial delegations included representatives of police, prosecution, the judiciary and commissions on the status of women. The consultations began mapping how relevant cases and information are currently recorded, validated and disseminated—and where gaps between institutions remain.

This matters because what cannot be consistently identified cannot be consistently counted.

A statistical definition of femicide serves a different purpose from a criminal-law definition. It does not create a new offence or determine criminal liability. Instead, it asks whether the circumstances surrounding the killing of a woman or girl reveal gender-related motivation or context. That requires looking beyond the fact of the homicide itself to information such as the relationship between victim and perpetrator, histories of violence, coercive control, stalking, prior threats and other circumstances surrounding the killing.

The distinction is critical. Without common definitions, variables and recording practices, the same underlying pattern of violence may appear differently—or disappear altogether—as information moves between police, prosecution, courts, health institutions and statistical systems. A shared framework makes it possible to identify those patterns more consistently, compare data across institutions and jurisdictions, and build a stronger evidence base for prevention.

The Supreme Court’s reference to the framework therefore comes at an important moment. It places an internationally agreed statistical instrument within Pakistan’s judicial discourse at the same time that national and provincial institutions are examining how that instrument could be operationalized in their own data systems. A superior court's reasoning does not stay within the case it decides. Judgments of the Supreme Court are read by high courts, cited in subsequent proceedings and studied in judicial academies, and what a bench treats as reliable evidence shapes what lower courts and investigators come to expect.

The judgment does not itself establish a statistical system or impose new recording requirements. But it gives judicial recognition to the central proposition on which the pilot rests: understanding femicide requires examining the gendered context in which a killing occurs.

That connection matters not only after a woman has been killed. The information needed to understand a femicide often exists long before the homicide—in previous complaints, protection proceedings, reports of stalking, evidence of coercive control, threats, injuries and other interactions with institutions. When these pieces of information are recorded inconsistently or remain isolated within separate systems, patterns of escalating violence can remain invisible until they are reconstructed after a death.

The ambition of the pilot is therefore larger than producing another report. It is to determine what information Pakistan’s institutions already hold, identify what is missing, and establish what would need to change for relevant data to be recorded and classified more consistently across institutions and over time.

UN Women Pakistan will continue this work with the Ministry of Human Rights and partners. Ultimately, progress will be measured not simply by completion of the pilot, but by whether its findings translate into stronger and more coherent national and provincial data systems—so that institutions are increasingly able to identify, record and count the same forms of violence in the same way.

Because counting femicide is not only about documenting deaths.

It is about making visible the patterns of violence that precede them—and generating the evidence needed to prevent the next one.