Abstract
Pakistan’s vague blasphemy laws are used to persecute minorities, settle personal scores and clamp down on free expression.
In 1986, Pakistan’s fundamentalist military dictator General Zia ul Haq promoted amendments to strengthen the country’s blasphemy laws. Over the next 25 years, the authorities charged an estimated 1,300 people under the laws. Violence and threats against those accused of blasphemy increased dramatically. Today, at least 16 people are on death row and another 20 are serving life sentences.
It wasn’t always this way. The country’s 1860 colonial penal code had a blasphemy provision, section 295, which dealt with religious offences, that was intended to prevent religious violence. Between 1927 and 1986, only 14 blasphemy cases were reported.
The introduction of these laws marked the legal culmination of a process of ‘Islamisation’, introduced by General Zia in the late 1970s as he sought the help of Islamists to challenge the Soviet Union’s presence in Afghanistan at the behest of the United States. The laws were brought in to solidify the influence of state-backed Sunni militant groups, supported by the military, which aimed to coercively impose control on speech and expression within Pakistani society. They formalised Pakistan’s status as a sectarian Islamic state – at the cost of and despite the opposition of large swathes of the Pakistani population.
General Zia’s toughening of the law led to an explosion of cases. The knowledge that blasphemy was an offence punishable by death inspired government officials and ordinary Pakistanis to accuse large numbers of their Muslim and non-Muslim fellow citizens of using ‘derogatory remarks, etc; in respect of the Holy Prophet’ or of defiling his name by ‘words, either spoken or written or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly’.
The current laws – sections 295 and 298 of the penal code – continue to serve the purpose for which they were enacted in 1986. Though the majority of cases are registered against Muslims (some 51%), an almost equal number are brought against religious minorities, who only constitute about 3 to 4 per cent of the country’s population.
The laws are extremely broad and vague. They do not require proof of intent to commit blasphemy. They do not require exacting standards of evidence and contain no remedial measures to deal with false allegations. And they allow the accuser’s interpretation of a particular behaviour – a comment, a scrawl on a piece of paper – as evidence. Because it is a criminal offence, once a case has been registered, it cannot be withdrawn. Police, prosecutors and judges are wary of being seen as soft on blasphemers so charges are rarely dropped.
Accusing someone of blasphemy is commonly used to settle personal vendettas, initiate land-grabs and to threaten, coerce and delegitimise those who are already at risk in society, such as religious minorities, women, children and the rural poor. The laws are so vague that powerful individuals, attention-seeking imams and an unaccountable elite-driven state can easily use them as instruments of persecution and coercion. At the time the laws were introduced, it suited both the military authorities and their allies among religious political parties.
Today it is a monster that is out of control. Real or perceived insults to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed remain an emotive, divisive issue not just in Pakistan but across the Islamic world. The response to The Innocence of Muslims, the anti-Muslim video uploaded to YouTube in Arabic in September 2012, and to the 2006 Danish cartoons, both of which led to widespread protests and death, clearly demonstrates this.
In Pakistan and elsewhere, accusations of blasphemy often lead to a closing of ranks by otherwise disparate and antagonistic schools of Islamic thought. Blasphemy has become a convenient bogeyman to beat back the struggle for free expression and incite violence and hatred against Western targets. It is significant that Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, was murdered in January 2011 for publicly calling for amendments to the blasphemy laws. It was not the Taliban or al Qaeda that was responsible for the murder, but Mumtaz Qadri, an avowed member of the Sufi-inspired Barelvi school of Islam.
For over a decade, the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has sought an international legal regime preventing the ‘defamation of religions’ at the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva. Until 2010, UN human rights bodies and the UN General Assembly passed majority resolutions along the lines proposed by the OIC. Only robust challenges based on the right to free expression and Western diplomatic interventions ensured that support for the project waned. The OIC dropped this campaign only two years ago. But in the aftermath of The Innocence of Muslims, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia is trying to revive the movement and Pakistan’s government has reaffirmed its intention to relaunch the campaign at the UN.
Since 1986, at least 52 people have been murdered after being accused of blasphemy
This fraught historical context and the apparently irreconcilable cultural and political fault lines would have remained the subject of heated rhetoric and debate and little else were it not for the country’s legal structures. The sectarianism of the Pakistani state and its political predisposition to avoid accountability, limit free speech, marginalise the rule of law and refuse to take responsibility for the security of its citizens has become ingrained in attitudes to the blasphemy laws.
One of the ironies is that those who support Pakistan’s blasphemy laws argue that they are necessary for preventing vigilante justice. The argument goes that, by offering legal routes to redress insults against the Prophet, private citizens are prevented from killing those accused of blasphemy. With this argument, the state relieves itself of its duty as non-partisan guarantor of its citizens’ security. This is not just an abstract concern: the public record culled from reported cases suggests that, since 1986, at least 52 people have been murdered after being accused of blasphemy.
Candlelight vigil commemorating Punjab governor Salman Taseer, who was murdered after he called for blasphemy laws to be reformed, 5 January 2011
Credit: Faisal Mahmood
State support for the use of blasphemy laws by private citizens is in part a reflection of a much greater crisis in Pakistan’s criminal justice system. The investigative capacity of the police force is outdated and inadequate. The police habitually cave in to Islamist-inspired mobs in the name of ‘preserving public order’, particularly when it comes to vendettas against religious minorities. And what police officer is willing to risk his life to confront mobs when they are paid a paltry salary and given no reason to think senior officials or the courts will back him up?
And what of Pakistan’s much-vaunted independent judiciary, which valiantly struggled against the military rule of General Pervez Musharraf? While the grave consequences of these laws have been evident for decades and offend basic rights to freedom of expression and religion, the judiciary continues to uphold discriminatory laws and provide legal justifications for the misplaced values they enshrine.
It is a sobering thought that, in contrast to the two-year training programme offered to civil servants, district judges receive barely a fortnight of orientation. These judges are meant to dispense justice without any training in judicial ethics and conduct, interpretation and application of the law, or even the basics of judgment-writing. They lack the essential staple of a proper judiciary: the capacity to dispense justice devoid of personal prejudice. Too often, the lower-level judiciary brings its own political and social prejudices to bear in its rulings.
Comparing the different public reactions to high-profile blasphemy cases in recent years, however, suggests a potential shift; the current crisis in the criminal justice system and the state’s failed attempts to deal with it may result in some change.
On 8 November 2010, Aasia Bibi, a 39-year-old Christian farmhand from Pakistan’s Punjab province, became the first woman in Pakistan to be sentenced to death for blasphemy. President Asif Zardari announced his intention to pardon her. Smelling blood, some Islamists went on the rampage. Supported by sections of the media, they offered money to anyone who killed Bibi and issued death threats to opponents and critics of the blasphemy laws. On 26 November 2010, Pakistan’s law minister ruled out any change to the laws. Three days later, in a clear case of judicial overreach, a provincial court barred the dithering president from issuing a pardon. Sherry Rehman, a legislator who had the courage to table a bill to amend the blasphemy laws, was forced into hiding.
How did the courts react? The Lahore High Court accepted a frivolous petition accusing Rehman of blasphemy and summoned her to answer the charge that proposing changes to the blasphemy law itself constituted blasphemy. The government caved in, and on 30 December 2010 it publicly reneged on a manifesto commitment to review discriminatory laws. Five days later came the murder of Taseer, which was shockingly applauded by many. In March 2011, Religious Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian who spoke out against the laws, was shot dead in Islamabad. Bibi continues to languish in prison.
Even many supporters of the blasphemy laws were traumatised by these events. But, more significantly, the events demonstrated that control of the blasphemy narrative and its use as an instrument of coercion, censorship and murder had slipped out of the hands of the privileged and could now be used against them.
In the months that followed, emboldened zealots made a rash of accusations against the unlikeliest of ‘blasphemers’, including a doctor who threw away a visiting card with the name Mohammed written on it. In July 2012, a mob in the city of Bhawalpur in Punjab province accused a mentally unstable man of blasphemy. He was promptly arrested by the police for allegedly burning a copy of the Quran in public. Local clerics rallied thousands of protesters to march to the police station and demand that the man be handed over to them. While officers called for reinforcement, the mob attacked, injuring several policemen. They pulled the man out of the station, dragged him on to the street and burned him alive. According to witnesses, hundreds of people looked on as he screamed for help.
But the recent case of Rimsha Masih, a 14-year-old Christian girl from a poor Islamabad suburb, provides a somewhat more hopeful contrast. Masih, who according to a medical report has a ‘significantly lower mental age’, was accused of burning pages of the Quran. On 17 August 2012, police took her into custody for her own protection after she was reportedly assaulted. Police in Islamabad beat back a mob demanding they hand her over to be killed. Threats against the wider Christian community in the area forced some 400 families to flee their homes.
This time Islamist groups – the same ones who had incited violence in order to prevent even a debate on the blasphemy laws taking place – adopted a significantly different stance. Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, an entity connected to hardline religious groups, described Masih as ‘Pakistan’s daughter’. Supporting calls for Masih’s release, he said:
We see Rimsha as a test case for Pakistan’s Muslims, Pakistan’s minorities and for the government. We don’t want to see injustice done … we will work to end this climate of fear. The accusers should be proceeded against with full force, so that no one would dare make spurious allegations.
What Ashrafi did not say was that the power to decide who was guilty of blasphemy risked slipping out of his hands and those of his colleagues in the religious political elite unless they acted to prevent a vigilante free-for-all – one that they incited in the first place. A fortnight later, local cleric Khalid Chishti, who had accused Masih of desecrating the Quran, was himself arrested. Witnesses came forward to inform the police they had seen him plant the torn pages in Masih’s bag in order to ‘rid the neighbourhood of Christians’. In an unprecedented twist, the accuser now stands accused of blasphemy. Masih has been released and remains in Pakistan, protected by the state at an undisclosed location. On 23 September, the police formalised the volte face, claiming to have found no evidence or witness to prove that Masih was guilty of blasphemy and stating on the record that all the evidence pointed towards her accuser being guilty.
Human Rights Watch has long argued that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws ought to be repealed. Failure to do so makes successive governments complicit in heinous abuses. Privately, some of the staunchest defenders of the blasphemy laws admit as much and accept the need for reform if not repeal. And the possibility of reform is quietly now on the table, not because of a sudden burst of empathy for the hundreds who have suffered and the millions who live in fear of the law, but because unless it happens, the flames of the blasphemy laws increasingly threaten to engulf both its creators and its beneficiaries.