A tribal court in Pakistan has fined the family of a 10-year-old boy for his alleged “extra-marital relations” with a married woman from a rival tribe, the police said on Tuesday.
The incident took place in a remote village of southern Sindh Province on Monday, police official, Ghulam Chachar, said.
Local communities in the area prefer a centuries-old tribal justice system known as “jirga”, but their decisions often draw outrage from rights groups.
The police official said jirga members did not conduct DNA testing before convicting the boy and issued the verdict based only on the allegations of the woman’s family.
The boy’s family was ordered to pay a fine of about $7,000 in spite of their pleas that he was too young to have a physical relationship, Chachar said.
Last year, a nine-month-old was charged in an attempted murder case along with his father and several other relatives.
Legal experts say that rural communities prefer the jirga system because corruption in the conventional judiciary and bureaucracy means that justice is either denied to or delayed for poor people.
An Islamabad-based lawyer, Rizwan Khan, said government has in recent years been trying to discourage the “illegal practice of parallel justice system” through a clampdown, but tribal courts continue to thrive.
dpa/NAN.