By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Justice Ayesha Malik, the first woman to sit on Pakistan’s Supreme Court, has been given the International Leader/Lifetime Award at the Justitia Awards 2026 in Vienna, in recognition of a judicial career that has placed gender equality and women’s rights at the centre of the country’s legal system.
The award, presented in the Austrian capital before an audience of judges, lawyers and legal professionals drawn from multiple jurisdictions, honours Justice Malik’s contribution to the development of law and justice, along with her long-standing efforts to widen women’s participation in the legal profession and in the institutions that shape it. Organisers framed the recognition not only as an acknowledgement of her individual record on the bench, but as a marker of the broader importance of women holding positions from which they can shape legal reasoning and the practical workings of judicial institutions.
Justice Malik’s career has been closely watched in Pakistan since her appointment to the Lahore High Court in March 2012, a role she held for almost a decade before her elevation to the Supreme Court. She took the oath as the first woman to serve on the country’s apex court in January 2022, a milestone that was widely reported at the time as a watershed moment for a judiciary in which women remain significantly under-represented. Her nomination had been a contested one, having initially been voted down by the Judicial Commission of Pakistan before winning approval the following year.
On the Lahore High Court, she built a reputation for a body of judgments engaging directly with questions of gender and discrimination, including a 2021 ruling that declared so-called “virginity tests” performed on women reporting rape or sexual assault to be unconstitutional and without scientific basis, a decision that went on to shape practice across Pakistan’s provinces.
While in Vienna to collect the award, Justice Malik also took part in the Women in Law Conference 2026, where she spoke during a session titled “Roadmap to Equality and Women’s Rights in Practice”. Looking back over her journey from the Lahore High Court bench to becoming the first woman on the Supreme Court, she discussed both the obstacles and the opportunities that have come with being a woman judge, and spoke of the need to build a gender perspective into legal reasoning and judicial practice more broadly.
She argued that the pursuit of equality cannot be confined to formal legal guarantees alone, and must take account of the real contexts in which women encounter and navigate the law. Legal principles and judicial institutions, she said, need to respond meaningfully to the lived realities women face, drawing on aspects of her own body of jurisprudence dealing with dignity, equality and the treatment of women within the justice system.
The award adds to a small but growing list of international honours received by Pakistani women working in law. The Pakistan-based Women in Law initiative, which has tracked the country’s representation at the Justitia Awards over recent years, described Justice Malik’s win as a “proud moment” for Pakistan. In a post on X, the organisation noted that she was the third Pakistani woman to receive a Justitia Award, each recognised in a different category: rights activist Jalila Haider was awarded the International Game Changer prize in 2023, while advocate Nida Usman Chaudhry — who also founded Women in Law — received the International Academia award in 2021.
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