Paul KeenanThe Christian woman’s last hope lies with Pakistan’s Supreme Court, writes Paul Keenan
October 16 was another black day for the Christian community in Pakistan. That day, the High Court in Lahore finally – after five postponements this year – heard the appeal of Asia Bibi against her 2010 conviction and death sentence for blasphemy against Islam.
Unfortunately, despite hopes entertained by the Christian woman’s legal team, that death sentence was upheld, much to the delight of Muslim clerics and fundamentalists gathered at the court, for whom the country’s blasphemy laws are an inviolable part of its sovereignty as an Islamic state.
As a case which has been closely monitored by the international community, the latest ruling was quickly condemned by the European Union. A spokesperson for Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union, expressed the hope that the verdict can still be “appealed and struck down” and called on Pakistan to “ensure for all its citizens full respect of human rights as guaranteed by international conventions to which it is party”.
Of the two aspirations voiced by the EU, an overturning of the death sentence imposed on Mrs Bibi appears to bear the tiniest glimmer of hope at this point. Immediately after the High Court ruling, the woman’s lawyers announced their intention to launch a final appeal to Pakistan’s Supreme Court.
Hope
Beyond the hope of another legal drive for justice for Asia Bibi, the period of waiting for a Supreme Court date also offers the slimmest of chances that Mrs Bibi’s predicament will be viewed in a changing light by politicians and legislators as time moves forward.
Readers of The Irish Catholic may recall that in early June of this year, then-Chief Jutsice Tasaduq Hussain Jillani issued a document calling for major protections for and improvements to the lives of religious minorities in Pakistan. Arising from the judge’s own inquiry into the devastating September 2013 suicide bombing of All Saints church in Peshawar, the 32-page document called on the government to offer immediate remedial action in a number of spheres.
He proposed, for example, the establishment of a task force to tackle religious intolerance, measures to address hate speech on social media, the formation of a Minority Rights Council to monitor the status of religious minorities, criminal actions against those who desecrate places of worship, a police service dedicated to protection of places of worship and an already existing 5% employment quota for non-Muslims in government-controlled sectors to be enforced.
Not only were former Chief Justice Jillani’s recommendations welcomed by minority representative groups, but more importantly, they were hailed on all sides of Pakistan’s parliament, members of which agreed on a cross-party basis to adopt the report’s provisions and move towards implementing improved protections – via a National Commission for Minorities – for non-Muslim and minority Muslim communities (such as the Ahmadiyya Muslim group, especially reviled within Pakistan as a heretical sect).
The promised enactment of protections is an especially important element for
Mrs Bibi’s lawyers who, till now, have fought an uphill
battle both in terms of receiving a kind ear as to the absurdity of the ‘evidence’ against their Christian client, and all in the face of fundamentalist threats and an apparent fear of the mob by judges in the lower courts.
Such elements are hard to dismiss when one re-examines the ‘facts’ of the Bibi case.
Arising from a verbal argument between two Muslim women and Mrs Bibi in 2009 over drinking water, the Christian woman’s death sentence was handed down on the testimony of those two accusing women over that of the Christian and in the absence of any tangible proof or further evidence.
Testimony
The convicting judge also allowed the testimony of a local imam, Qari Mohammad Salam, who spoke later with the Muslim women but who was absent at the crucial time of the alleged offence. (Mrs Bibi has since alleged that the imam worked against her when she rejected his offer to convert to Islam.) Coincidently, Salam was present in the High Court last week among those fundamentalists monitoring the case and publicly hailed the confirmed verdict afterwards as “a victory for Islam”. (Set this ‘victory’ against the case of imam Khalid Jadoon Chishti, a central figure in the blasphemy case of 14-year-old Rimsha Masih, who himself stood accused of blasphemy when his accusations backfired. He was acquitted despite testimony from numerous witnesses as to his defilement of Koranic text, the tangible evidence of which was also available to the courts.)
Thus, in the lofty setting of Pakistan’s highest court at some future date, it is to be hoped that new measures to protect hard-pressed religious minorities will offer Bibi her very best chance yet of salvation from her five-year nightmare. There are, however, complications to this flow of events, lying beyond the jurisdiction of any court or government.
It is hard to dispute that, in spite of moves at a judicial and governmental level, Pakistan is not winning its battle against Islamic extremists within its own borders. Tribal and sectarian bloodletting continues apace as religious ‘visionaries’ vie for control of the nation. Attacks on religious minorities have not ceased, with a special vehemence for those perceived as attacking Islam or the blasphemy law (the ‘black law’ to minorities).
In September, this reality was clearly illustrated by the fate of Mohammad Ashgar, a paranoid schizophrenic prisoner at Adiala jail in Rawalpindi since blasphemy allegations were levelled against him, specifically that he claimed to be a prophet. Outraged by this, a prison guard smuggled a pistol into the jail and shot the elderly man twice in the back.
Having undergone treatment for his wounds, Ashgar has been returned to the same prison.
In the same week as the Ashgar shooting, a leading academic in Islamic studies, Professor Muhammad Shakil Auj, was shot dead as he approached Karachi University. He had apparently been targeted following allegations – levelled by fellow teaching staff – that a speech he delivered in America in 2012 had content blasphemous to Islam. A subsequent fatwa deemed Professor Auj “worthy of murder”.
There are other cases, many of them previously reported by The Irish Catholic: the May 2014 slaying in Multan of lawyer Rashid Rehman, whose ‘crime’ in the eyes of his killers was the legal representation offered to a lecturer, Junaid Hafeez, accused of blasphemy; the 2010 murder of Salman Taseer, then-governor of Punjab whose visit to Asia Bibi in prison led his own bodyguard to shoot him, and the killing in 2011 of Shahbaz Bhatti, the then-Minorities Minister who publicly questioned the blasphemy law. Quite aside from the 17 people currently lingering on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy, the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad has recorded 60 extrajudicial slayings of ‘blasphemers’ and their defenders since 1990 (one of them a judge, Arif Iqbal Bhatti, murdered in 1997 after his acquittal of two blasphemy suspects).
Following the latest development in the Bibi case, the Catholic Church in Lahore announced a day of prayer for her on October 19.
It is only fair to report that, as before, many Muslims joined with the Christian community in showing solidarity with the imprisoned woman, who, regardless of level-headed justice, will continue to live under a death sentence in the eyes of many more.