Saba was 18 when she eloped to marry a young man she loved. When her father called her home – supposedly to reconcile – he and her uncle beat her, shot her in the head, put her in a bag and threw her in a river in Pakistan. They said she had brought dishonour on her family and that they had done the “right thing”.

Amazingly, Saba survived and was able to get help. However, while her father and uncle were arrested, authorities had to drop the charges because of a loophole in Pakistan’s law that allows perpetrators to go free if the victim – or the victim’s family – “forgives” them.

Facing intense pressure from the male elders in her community, Saba was forced to forgive her father and uncle, and abandon her hope for justice.

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Every year in Pakistan, more than 1,000 women’s and girls’ lives are violently cut short, supposedly in the name of honour. And because of the loophole in legislation, the killers continue to walk free. Shot, strangled, burned or stoned, wives, daughters and mothers have been killed on mere suspicions, or on a false accusation of the most trivial of matters.

According to the Human Rights Commission, such killings rose by 15% between 2013 and 2014, when 1,005 cases were reported. As it stands, the law considers honour crimes an offence against the individual and not the state, and therefore the victim can choose to forgive the perpetrator. If the victim survives, she is pressed to forgive and if she is killed – as happens in the majority of cases – her family has the right to forgive the perpetrator. So when a father kills his daughter, his wife can forgive him. And when a brother kills his sister, his parents can forgive him. In essence, this means that there is impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes.

Saba’s powerful story is told in Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, which on Sunday won an Academy Award for best documentary short. Together with the film-makers and change.org, Equality Now, which has worked on this issue for more than two decades, is advocating a stronger law in Pakistan, one that would ensure perpetrators are prosecuted for honour crimes with no possibility of compromise or forgiveness. It is vital that this loophole is closed so that a convicted person cannot escape accountability.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Saba, who fell in love and eloped, was targeted by her father and uncle but survived to tell her story. Photograph: SOC Films

Honour crimes have nothing to do with Islamic law. Rather, the principles of compromise and forgiveness effectively sanction these crimes. Pakistan’s government took rape out of the category of “Zina” crimes (crimes of morality that require eye witness testimony) because this punished rape victims who could not provide eye witnesses. Similarly, it could now intervene to ensure that compromise and forgiveness no longer apply to honour crimes.

Obaid-Chinoy’s film and its Oscar win have brought the issue of honour crimes back into the public consciousness, but this is not the first time the issue has drawn global attention. In April 1999, Samia Sarwar, a young woman whose mother was a medical doctor and father was president of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province Chamber of Commerce, was gunned down in the office of her lawyers, Asma Jehangir and Hina Jilani. Her assassin was hired by her family, as she wanted to divorce her abusive husband and marry an army captain with whom she had fallen in love.

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This case involved an educated family and the crime was committed before many witnesses, in a famous lawyer’s office. However, there was complete impunity for the assassin and his accomplices – Samia’s mother and uncle. A bill was put before the parliament at the time, but it failed to gain support.

Seventeen years on, Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, has declared his commitment to eliminate honour killings. In a historic sign of progress, he is working on amendments to Pakistan’s penal code to ensure that the perpetrators of such killings are punished. The amendments could be sent to parliament this week. We understand that the law would ensure the Islamic legal concept of forgiveness does not apply to cases where the families of the victim and the perpetrator are the same.

The government of Pakistan can deter perpetrators with a strong message that it will not tolerate such crimes, as well as take steps towards its obligations to ensure “zero tolerance” for crimes against women and girls. We cannot afford to lose momentum this time, particularly as new cases are occurring all the time.