A reporter walking up to the pavement outside the press club in Quetta, in the west of Pakistan, found a camp that had been there for three days. Inside it were women who had not eaten since Saturday. Sitting among them was a lawyer in her thirties who had made exactly one condition for getting up again, and it was not a small one. She wanted the chief of Pakistan’s army to come to the city himself.
Not an aide. Not a letter. Not a committee. Him, in person, and in civilian clothes rather than a uniform, so that he would be standing there as a man rather than as an institution, listening to the women whose husbands and sons had been killed in a long run of targeted attacks on their community. She told the reporter she would keep going until he arrived. She wanted assurances about security that were specific rather than general, and she wanted concrete steps towards finding and prosecuting the people doing the killing.
It is worth sitting with how unpromising that looked from the outside. A hunger strike is the protest of last resort, the one you reach for when every other lever has already been pulled and nothing moved. She was not a party leader. She had no seat, no bloc of votes, no television channel. She was a lawyer with a small practice in a provincial city, sitting on concrete, making a demand of the single most powerful office in the country.
The army chief agreed to talks. The camp came down. The Right Livelihood Foundation, which has just named her one of its laureates for this year, puts it more strongly than that in her citation and says the strike forced him to negotiate directly with the women of her community, something no woman from it had achieved before, and that attacks fell afterwards and stayed lower. What is beyond dispute from the contemporaneous reporting in Pakistan is the sequence, and the sequence is the part that matters. She set a condition that looked impossible. The condition was met.
Her name is Jalila Haider, she was born in Quetta in the mid-1980s, and she is a member of the Hazara community, a minority that has been the target of sustained violence in that part of Pakistan for decades. That is the only time in this piece her community needs naming, because her award citation turns on it and the story is unintelligible without it. For the rest of it she is what she actually is, which is a working lawyer with a case list.
She got there the ordinary way, which in her circumstances was not ordinary at all. She studied at University Law College in Quetta and took her law degree in 2010, the first woman from her community in the city to qualify as a lawyer. She also holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Balochistan, and years later won a scholarship to the University of Sussex in England. In 2011 she opened her own practice.
Think about what being first means in practice, as opposed to in a profile. There was nobody ahead of her to ask how any of it worked. No senior woman from her background to tell her which judges were difficult, which courtrooms were safe to be seen walking into, how to answer a client’s family when they asked whether she was really the lawyer or the lawyer’s assistant. She was building the path and walking it at the same time, which is slower and much lonelier than following one.
And then she used it on the cases nobody else wanted. The foundation’s citation says her firm has handled more than seven thousand cases since it opened, which is the foundation’s own count and has not been independently audited, so take it as the awarding body’s figure rather than an established number. The shape of the caseload is the more telling thing. A great deal of it is free. A great deal of it is family work, which is to say divorce, custody and inheritance, the cases where a woman arrives with no money of her own and a very short window in which to act.
By the foundation’s account her firm has also restored freedom of movement for more than six hundred political activists and human rights defenders, people whose names had been put on lists that stopped them travelling. She knows what that particular problem feels like from the inside, because her own name went onto Pakistan’s exit control list after she took part in protest gatherings, and some years after the hunger strike she was held for roughly seven hours at the airport in Lahore and stopped from boarding a flight.
That detention is worth separating out, because it has been quietly merged with the hunger strike in a lot of the summaries now circulating online, and the two are different events two years apart. The strike was the camp outside the press club. The airport was a separate afternoon of being kept in a room and then let go, which she treated roughly the way she treats everything else, as a thing that happened and then a thing to carry on past.
Her citation also credits her with a six-year defence of fifteen boys from Balochistan accused of terrorism offences. Six years is the detail to hold onto there. Nobody does six years on a case out of enthusiasm. You do six years because you took it on and the alternative to you staying on it is nobody being on it. And in the course of a single recent year, again by the foundation’s count, she represented families in thirty killings of women, the kind of case that in many places never reaches a courtroom at all because the people who would have to bring it are the same people accused of it.
Then there is the workshop, which is the part of her record that has least to do with law and tells you most about how she thinks.
In 2015 she founded an organisation called We the Humans, and one of the things it runs is a rug-weaving workshop. According to the foundation, it employs around four hundred women who were widowed when their husbands were killed in attacks. Again, that is the awarding body’s figure and no independent count of it exists, so it should be read as their number rather than a verified one. The design of the place is what is interesting. Wages are set against international labour standards rather than against what the local market would get away with paying a widow with no other options. There is a free creche on site. There are literacy classes for the mothers, who in many cases never got any schooling themselves. And there is a condition attached to the work, which is that the children go to school.
That last part is the whole argument in miniature. A charity hands out money and the money runs out. A job pays a wage, and a wage with a creche attached means the wage is actually collectable by a woman with small children, and a wage with a schooling condition attached means the next generation in that household does not arrive at adulthood unable to read. She did not design a relief scheme. She designed a way out that takes about fifteen years to work and committed to it anyway.
The legislative work runs along the same line. She was consulted on Pakistan’s 2019 law on the rights of transgender citizens, including the provision allowing people to state their own gender on identity documents, which sounds technical until you consider that without a usable identity card a person in Pakistan cannot open a bank account, inherit, vote, or get most of what the state hands out. She helped draft Balochistan’s legislation on early child marriage, which set eighteen as the minimum age for both sexes rather than the lower age that had applied to girls. And she ran a programme on data protection and online safety which the foundation says reached more than fifteen thousand schoolgirls, which is once more their figure and not an audited one.
She was also one of the people who got the first women’s march in Balochistan off the ground, in a province where that was not a safe thing to organise, and she co-founded a women’s political organisation, the Women’s Democratic Front, in 2017.
About the thing she is working against, this piece is going to be deliberately sparing, because the subject of violence against a minority community attracts a particular kind of comment thread and a casualty list is what opens the gate. One figure, once, for weight, and it comes from Pakistan’s own national human rights commission rather than from any campaigner: an official of the commission, speaking at the time of the hunger strike, put the number of members of her community killed in Quetta over the preceding five years at five hundred and nine. That is a state body counting, not an activist estimating. The four hundred widows at the looms are the rest of the arithmetic and they do not need a number attached.
What that figure is for is scale, not spectacle. It explains why women sat on a pavement for days without eating rather than filing a petition, and why the request was for the army chief rather than for a local official. It also explains the quieter cost in her own life, which is that she has worked for years under death threats and has stayed in the city anyway. She could have left. She had the degree, she had the international scholarship, and she had, after a while, the kind of profile that makes leaving straightforward. The BBC put her on its list of a hundred women in 2019. The United States named her an International Woman of Courage the following year. Pakistan gave her a national peace award a few years after that. Any one of those is a door. She kept the practice in Quetta.
Which brings the story to Stockholm, and to an award most readers outside a fairly narrow world have never heard of.
The Right Livelihood Award was set up in 1980 by a writer who thought the Nobel prizes had blind spots, particularly around the environment and around people doing unglamorous work a long way from any capital city. It has been called the alternative Nobel ever since, usually by everyone except the foundation itself. There is no entry fee and no public vote, which matters, because it means you cannot campaign your way to it or get your followers to click for you. A jury picks the laureates, and a good share of them are people whose own countries have not thanked them for anything.
This year the foundation named four. A Georgian lawyers’ association recognised for holding a line on democracy under an autocratic crackdown. A rural women’s assembly in southern Africa organising around land and seed. A computer scientist in the United States recognised for her work on concentrated power in artificial intelligence. And a lawyer from Quetta, cited for breaking barriers as the first female lawyer from her community, for challenging ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution, and for working from the conviction that no human being is illegal.
One small thing is worth being straight about, because it will not matter to most readers and will matter a great deal to anyone who goes looking. The foundation’s citation describes the hunger strike as lasting seven days. The newspapers in Pakistan reporting it as it happened recorded the camp going up at the end of April and coming down on the second day of May, which is closer to five. Nobody is lying. A strike like that has a ragged start and a ragged end, with people joining and leaving, and the organisers and the papers were plainly counting from different points. The number of days is the least interesting fact in the story and it is the one the internet has argued about.
What is not in dispute is who was sitting on that pavement, what she asked for, and that she got it.
The ceremony is still ahead of her. She will travel to Stockholm at the start of December, and the woman who goes up to collect it will be the first from her community to have qualified as a lawyer anywhere, who then spent fifteen years spending that qualification on people who could not pay her for it. The prize comes with money and with a platform, and on past form she will put both through the same machine as everything else: the practice, the looms, the creche, the schooling condition, the long cases nobody else will sit through.
There is a version of her life in which none of this happened. She passes the bar, she is correctly celebrated as a first, she takes the paying work that a scarce qualification commands, and she is a respected lawyer in a difficult city. Nobody would have had a word to say against it.
Instead she sat down on the concrete outside a press club with the women whose husbands had been killed, and she did not get up. The army chief came to the table. The looms are still running. And eight years on, a jury in Sweden went looking for people whose work had cost them something, and found a lawyer in Quetta who had never left.