It all began with the political trailblazer herself. 'I became federal law secretary for Benazir [Bhutto] in '88. I was part of the small group that got the entire election held,' he says with pride, recalling the landmark election of the country's first female prime minister. Back then Bhutto had placed Mr Zahid at the head of a small working group called the Commission of Inquiry for Women, which included Asma Jahangir, now head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

But if the country's women had expected a big change with Bhutto's appointment, Mr Zahid believes that they were let down.

'First, Benazir didn't call for it [women's rights], the whole Senate did - and when we finished, I think just one or two of our recommendations out of 400 were ever implemented,' he says of the study, which took the group years to complete. 'It was never officially published. If I want to see a copy I have to go to a women's organisation.'

Bhutto had two opportunities to make a big change for women, Mr Zahid says - she was prime minister twice - but surprisingly little was done.

In fact, it was when military chief Pervez Musharraf seized power in 1999, and Mr Zahid had moved from chief justice of the Sindh high court to a Supreme Court judge, that he says some progress came about. Mr Musharraf, who stepped down last year, tripled the number of seats reserved for women in the National Assembly to 60, and reserved 17 per cent of the seats in provincial assemblies, though these lawmakers would be picked by their parties rather than directly elected. Mr Musharraf's era also saw the Women's Protection Bill passed, which brought certain crimes such as rape under the penal code rather than religious law. In the old system, rape victims could be jailed.

'Before that we had many cases where the man accused his wife of an affair,' Mr Zahid says. 'In one case I interviewed a woman in jail and she told me: 'I was not well, so my husband took me to hospital, and he and his brother would come and see me. One day the brother brought his friend, and the friend stayed outside the door of the room. When they went away, my husband asked me, who was he?' ... The woman didn't know, and the man took a case against her. She remained in jail for three years until she was acquitted.'

As the lone man in a family of women, and married to a doctor, Mr Zahid has long struggled with his country's views on women, so for him this was a singular triumph. 'Now such cases are almost extinct,' he says. But he adds that sex outside of marriage remains illegal for women, punishable with up to five years in prison if proved by pregnancy.

When the new government came to power last April, human rights watchdogs noted the boost given to civil and political rights, and many foresaw a similar lift for women. President Asif Ali Zardari is the widower of Benazir Bhutto, assassinated last year, and there are women prominently placed in his party.

But a year on, Mr Zahid has yet to see much real change. A sexual harassment and domestic violence bill are inching their way through the parliamentary process. But is this enough, considering that religious radicals demolished more than 100 girls' schools in the north last year and an estimated 80 per cent of women have experienced domestic violence?

'If you are being mistreated by your in-laws or your husband in Pakistan, even now, you will not take this case to the provincial courts,' says Mr Zahid. 'Many judges have not been trained or sensitised to gender issues. They say: 'How is this woman allowed to come to court?' The law has been made by men, courts are men, police are all male, and when a court case involves a woman, everything is against that woman.' In a Karachi women's prison, Mr Zahid estimates that 17 to 20 per cent of the inmates are there for murdering their husbands.

'They think it's their only way out.'

At the Legal Aid Office and its sister organisation, the Women Prisoners Welfare Society, partly run by his wife, Farhat Nasir Zahid, women are given free representation by sympathetic advocates. Before LAO, Mr Zahid says, little effort was made to arrange bail for the women or attend to their needs, and some might not hear news from the outside for months at a time, their cases dragging on for years. Some had their children in jail with them. Under LAO the prison population has gone from about 700 to 300 inmates, most released early or on bail.

But to be a woman alone in Pakistan is also a daunting prospect, and Mr Zahid worries about the circumstances his clients go back to. Most of them are young women who worked in the 'informal sector' before they were arrested - in factories or offices where they were not registered and received no benefits or protection from labour laws. Many are government-owned, he says. 'Social empowerment is important, but unless women are economically empowered they will always remain under the control of the man. They will always be vulnerable.'

Out in the country's rural perimeters, women walk a particularly perilous line. There, tribal customs and radical Muslim principles have evolved, away from the liberalisation of the cities, with community elders and religious leaders still preaching a fiery, misogynistic brand of Islam and ruling through unregulated tribal courts.

It is from the 'deep south' in Baluchistan and northern Sindh that details of horrific honour killings have been escaping. A combination of fear and religious rigour in these areas keeps most cases from the court.

Mr Zahid remembers a recent seminar on domestic violence, run by an NGO and attended by 17 district judges. 'For two to three hours I listened to speeches. When my turn came I said: 'I would like to know how much experience is in this room.' The total in the room was about 200 years. I said: 'How many cases of domestic violence have you had between you?'' He pauses. 'Not one! And I asked: 'How many cases of honour killings?' Just one.'

Mr Zahid believes that this mindset has little chance of being changed from the top down. As well as its general inaction, Mr Zahid and commentators across the country have noted at least two grave missteps on the part of Mr Zardari's government. When five women were buried alive in Baluchistan last summer - three of them girls on their way to be married - one federal minister, Mir Israrullah Zehri, defended the acts in parliament as 'custom'. Another minister, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani, was revealed to have helmed a tribal court ruling that saw five children handed over between families as a compensation payment. They were later returned. Both ministers promptly received promotions and Mr Bijarani is now minister of education. Pakistan's human rights community was horrified, and so was Mr Zahid - he had taught Mr Bijarani in law school.

'Why did Mr Zardari accept them?' he asks. 'What does that say? If you're going to make compromises, you're not going to make any headway. It means that no change is going to come about as far as women are concerned in Pakistan.'

But back in Sindh, no longer in court, Mr Zahid takes satisfaction from the small victories. The Karachi women's jail has 16 modern bathrooms, an expanded outdoor area, fans and televisions, and it has become a model for women's prisons in the country.

This has been managed, Mr Zahid says with a grin, because most of the officials he has to deal with have appeared before him in the court. He might have reduced the scope of his work, but the former judge now gets to enjoy visible change.

'There is such a difference among the women. You can see it in their eyes that there is hope,' he says.

It's a sentiment he would like to see move beyond the prison walls.