The Lahore registry of the Supreme Court has overturned multiple lower court verdicts to restore the ancestral property rights of a woman and her daughters, ending a 71-year-old legal dispute.
A two-member bench, authoring a detailed judgment, headed by Justice Shahid Bilal Hassan, invalidated prior rulings of the trial, appellate and high courts as the apex court maintained that the historical findings of the subordinate judiciary ran completely contrary to established legal and factual realities.
The case stems from the demise of the family patriarch in 1955, in the aftermath of which, two brothers surreptitiously registered the entire inherited estate under their own names, utilising an unverified “oral gift” to completely lock out their mother and sisters.
Striking down the transfer, the SC declared that inheritance was an automatic Sharia and legal entitlement, rather than a concession dependent on male relatives. The bench ruled that fraudulent transfers, fabricated gifts and domestic pressure could not be used to circumvent a woman’s constitutional right to her share.
Crucially, official revenue records revealed that the mother and sisters continued to collect profits from the land’s income for years following the alleged transaction. The bench observed that the continuous revenue stream proved the female heirs were kept entirely in the dark regarding the fraudulent gift.
Justice Hassan noted that the legal onus of proving a verbal property transfer lies squarely on the beneficiaries. The court held that the initial trial court committed a grave legal error by accepting the mere claim of an oral gift as its own validation.
