Why the right to marry means little for blind and disabled people in Pakistan without someone to stand beside them when the decision is made
Vision Without Barriers Research & Advocacy Team | August 2026
By: Dua Shuja | Program and Research Consultant
The law is unambiguous. Pakistan’s disability rights legislation guarantees every disabled person the right to marry whoever they choose. What the law does not guarantee is that anyone will be in the room to make sure that choice is real.
In 2020, Pakistan’s federal capital territory passed a law stating plainly that persons with disabilities have the right to marry a person of their own choice and raise a family without discrimination. It also made forced sterilization a criminal offense and protected disabled people’s right to remain with their families rather than be institutionalized. On paper, it is one of the more progressive disability statutes in the region.
But a right written into law and a right a person can actually use are two different things. For a blind man or woman whose family is arranging a marriage, there is currently no one whose job it is to sit with them, in private, and ask a simple question: is this what you want? No caseworker to screen for coercion. No advocate to explain what consent legally requires. No standing service anywhere in the country built specifically around that moment. Pakistan has the right on the books. It does not yet have the infrastructure to make it real.
A useful comparison, ten thousand kilometers away
It helps to see what the alternative looks like. In the United States, every state and territory runs a federally mandated Protection & Advocacy agency, 57 of them in total, whose job includes exactly this kind of intervention: free legal representation for disabled people in disputes over guardianship, custody, housing, and the right to choose a partner or spouse. The National Federation of the Blind runs a parallel Legal Program that trains advocates specifically to support blind people through conservatorship and family disputes, and publishes ready-made self-advocacy tools for blind parents and students. None of this is aspirational. It is functioning, funded, and has existed for decades.
The American system is not without its own tensions, marrying can quietly cut a disabled person’s Supplemental Security Income by roughly a quarter, a well-documented policy quirk sometimes called the “SSI marriage penalty,” and one reason some couples choose never to formalize their relationship at all. But the comparison is instructive less for what the U.S. gets right on benefits, and more for what it gets right on process: when a disabled person’s family or marital life is in question, there is a name and a phone number for someone whose job is to advocate for them. Pakistan has no equivalent.
Where the gap actually sits
It’s worth being precise here, because precision matters for advocacy. An arranged marriage where a disabled person is consulted and genuinely consents is not, in itself, a rights violation, it is a normal and often loving part of Pakistani family life, disability or no disability. The concern researchers and disability-rights lawyers raise is narrower and more specific: what happens when marriage is used, quietly and without ill intent, as a substitute for a long term care plan. A family worried about who will look after their blind daughter or son in twenty years arranges a marriage to secure that future, sometimes without fully involving the disabled person in the decision itself.
| Researchers who study this pattern describe it as typically arising “from a place of desperation about future care, not malice.”— published research on disability and family decision-making in South Asian communities |
That distinction changes how any advocacy response should be built. This is not primarily a story about villains. It is a story about families making a difficult decision with no professional support, no formal consent process, and no clear line, the kind the UK has built into its own law between a valid arranged marriage and a forced one, to help them get it right. Pakistan’s guardianship and marriage consent rules still sit largely within classical family law frameworks that were never written with disability or informed consent for someone who cannot read a document independently, specifically in mind.
Nobody is starting from zero
The good news is that Pakistan does not need to build this from scratch. A capable ecosystem of organizations already does adjacent work and already has the community trust a new initiative would take years to earn. The Pakistan Association of the Blind, founded in the 1970s and linked to the World Blind Union, remains the backbone of the country’s organized blind movement. NOWPDP, active in twelve cities since 2008, runs a program that helps unregistered disabled people obtain the government identity documents that are often a prerequisite for any legal claim at all. The Pakistan Independent Living Centre, the Disabled Welfare Association, and the Pakistan Foundation Fighting Blindness all offer counseling, vocational support, or advocacy that sits one step away from, but does not yet include, formal legal support around marriage decisions specifically.
What none of them currently run is the piece that would close the gap: a trained advocate a family can call when an arranged marriage is on the table, whose role is simply to confirm, gently and confidentially, that the disabled person understands what is happening and genuinely agrees to it.
What closing the gap could look like
- A simple, replicable consent protocol, modeled loosely on the UK’s capacity to consent standard and the U.S. Protection & Advocacy approach that a trained advocate can use whenever a family raises an arranged marriage involving a disabled relative.
- A program built inside an existing, trusted organization rather than a new standalone body, so it inherits community reaches instead of spending years building it.
- Advocacy to extend the ICT Act’s marriage-choice protections beyond Islamabad into Sindh, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan, where the same guarantee currently does not legally exist.
- Locally documented Pakistani case studies, nearly everything published on disability and arranged marriage so far comes from UK research on diaspora communities, leaving Pakistan’s own experience almost entirely undocumented.
- Messaging that treats families as partners in the solution, not as the problem, since the evidence consistently points to concern for a loved one’s future, not indifference to their wishes, as the driving force.
Why this matters now
Pakistan has already done the hardest part of protecting this right in principle: it wrote the guarantee into law and signed the international treaty that requires it. What remains is the far less glamorous, far more necessary work of building the small, human infrastructure, a trained person, a clear process, a confidential conversation, that turns a legal guarantee into a lived one. Vision Without Barriers believes that gap is closeable, and that the organizations best positioned to close it are already working in Pakistan today. Our next step is figuring out how to help them do it.
This article is adapted from an internal VWB research brief, “Legal & Government Support Programs for Disability, Marriage & Family Situations” (August 2026), which draws on sources including the Administration for Community Living, the National Disability Rights Network, the National Federation of the Blind, the Gazette of Pakistan, the Oxford Human Rights Hub, the Tahirih Justice Center, and peer-reviewed research on disability and family decision-making. A full source list is available on request.