Once a reply has been tendered, you will both be called for a ‘pre-trial hearing’, where the judge will essentially ask if you are willing to discard your differences and enter into a compromise (albeit an overenthusiastic adjudicator may take this liberty to grill you with intrusive and at times insensitive questions). Per law, your husband should have no more than 30 or so days to appear before the court and submit his reply, but in practice, a cunning lawyer can easily employ some of the procedural tricks of our trade and wheedle out a couple of months.ĭivorce laws in our country do not treat men and women with even the faintest trace of parity. On the first date of hearing, the judge shall admit your suit and direct your counsel to serve notices on your spouse, the costs of which you must necessarily bear. If you are fortunate enough to have a delegated right of divorce (talaq-i-tafweez), you may enjoy all the privilege that is accorded to a man and follow the exact same procedure as summarised above, but, if you hold no such right (as is the case with the majority of marriages), you must take recourse to our family courts, and there, in dingy corridors where anxious families pace around in endless circles, frantically chasing the slippery spectre of justice, you must file and contest a suit seeking dissolution of your marriage by way of khula - either on account of a legally recognised fault (like cruelty, desertion, impotence and such) or no fault at all (like the fact that you believe that the two of you are simply incompatible).įor this, you will need to hire a lawyer, who will doubtless charge a fee - minimal or reasonable or extortionate, as the case may be. If on the other hand you happen to be a Muslim woman, this process gets far more complicated. If you fail to reconcile within a 90-day period, or simply neglect or even wilfully refuse to go when summoned by the council, the divorce will stand automatically finalised, the local body will issue a certificate of confirmation, and voila! You shall be free from the contractual and holy bonds of matrimony. Within 30 days of having been notified so, the local body in question shall form what the law calls an ‘arbitration council’, which shall be tasked with bringing about a reconciliation between you and your estranged spouse. All in all, it is a wholly unilateral procedure - final, effective and dependent on none.

All you are required to do is to pronounce ‘talaq’ in front of two witnesses (verbally or in writing, the choice is entirely yours) and then notify this fact to both your wife and the relevant local body - typically a union council or a cantonment board or some synonymous set-up. IF you are a Muslim man in this country, getting divorced is a remarkably simple and elegant process.

Pakistan law about divorce in urdu