FROM DECREE TO DOORSTEP: THE ENFORCEMENT GAP IN MAINTENANCE LITIGATION BEFORE PAKISTAN’S FAMILY COURTS, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO SINDH

Abstract

A decree for maintenance is only as valuable as the money it eventually places in a mother’s hand. Over the past decade Pakistan’s family law has grown steadily more generous on the question of entitlement: The Supreme Court now holds that a wife’s right to maintenance arises from the nikah itself and not from rukhsati, that arrears of maintenance are a debt like any other, and that a child’s maintenance must be fixed by reference to the child’s reasonable needs and the father’s real means. Yet the machinery for converting a decree into actual payment has barely moved since the West Pakistan Family Courts Act was enacted in 1964. This paper examines that enforcement gap from the vantage point of the trial court and the mediation room. It sets out the statutory framework, traces the life cycle of an unpaid decree, identifies the principal ways in which judgment debtors evade payment, and reviews recent superior court rulings that simultaneously widen the wife’s entitlement and narrow the executing court’s coercive options. Drawing on comparative experience from Egypt, Tunisia, Malaysia and the United Kingdom, and on Pakistan’s own obligations under the Constitution, CEDAW and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the paper argues that the next stage of family law reform must concern collection rather than entitlement. It proposes a set of practical reforms for Sindh, including mandatory interim maintenance, statutory disclosure of means, deduction at source, a legislatively authorized regime of document restrictions for persistent defaulters, mediated payment plans, and a state-backed maintenance advance fund.