ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court of Pakistan has restored the property inheritance rights of female heirs in a decades-old land dispute, delivering a judgment underscoring that inheritance of ancestral property is a vested legal and religious right, not something that can be surrendered through informal family arrangements.
The dispute traces back to 1955, when, following the death of the parties’ father, two brothers transferred the family’s inherited property into their own names. They claimed their mother and sisters had orally gifted away their share of the ancestral land.
Appellant Noor Muhammad challenged this claim, arguing the so-called gift was a fabricated device to strip female heirs of their legitimate property inheritance. For decades, the trial court, appellate court, and high court upheld the brothers’ claim, leaving the sisters excluded from land that was rightfully theirs.
A two-judge Supreme Court bench, comprising Justices Shahid Bilal Hassan and Shakeel Ahmad, reversed these findings, declaring all prior judgments void and ordering revenue authorities to correct the land record so the sisters’ property inheritance is formally recognised.
The Court ruled that the burden of proving an oral gift lies with those who benefit from it, not with female heirs seeking their inheritance, and reiterated that a valid gift requires clear declaration, acceptance, and delivery of possession. Importantly, it held that revenue mutations serve fiscal record-keeping purposes only and cannot, by themselves, transfer or extinguish property inheritance rights.
The Court also found no unjustified delay in the claim, noting that the sisters had continued to receive income shares from the land for years, indicating no knowledge of the exclusion.
Anchoring its ruling in constitutional guarantees of equality and property rights, alongside Islamic principles, the Court characterised the deprivation of women’s inheritance of property as an entrenched social issue that demands effective enforcement, not just legal recognition on paper.
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