A new report finds Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are being significantly misused, with many defendants facing baseless accusations, protracted legal battles and lengthy pre-trial prison time as judges tread carefully to avoid offending religious groups.
The U.S.-based Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) on Monday released its findings after monitoring 24 blasphemy lawsuits for six months during 2022 in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's most populous province, Punjab.
The CJF said 15 of the accused are facing mandatory death sentences if convicted. However, the report said its monitors had noted little progress in most cases, with 217 out of 252 hearings adjourned, leaving many defendants stuck in pre-trial detention.
“This report shows a process fraught with significant delays and unfairness, exacerbating the widespread climate of misuse, discrimination, and intimidation that has developed around Pakistan’s blasphemy law,” said Zimran Samuel, a CFJ legal expert and visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics.
“Pakistan’s blasphemy provisions in their current form and as they are being implemented are in urgent need of reform and reconsideration,” Samuel said.
Making derogatory remarks against Islam or the Prophet Muhammad in Muslim-majority Pakistan is punishable by death under the country’s blasphemy laws, though no one has ever been executed under the laws.
The CFJ’s report criticized the country’s blasphemy laws for being inconsistent with international standards, especially the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The study noted that many blasphemy accusations lack evidence, with complainants often not witnessing the alleged acts. In some cases, it added that the specific blasphemous words are not even identified.
Despite safeguards in place, such as the requirement for government approval of charges, these are often disregarded, the report alleged.
The CFJ stated that defendants are often arrested without warrants, denied bail, and subjected to repeated adjournments due to missing witnesses, prolonging their legal ordeals. It called for Pakistan to repeal its blasphemy laws, raise the standards for filing allegations, deter false accusations, and reform court procedures to prevent endless delays.
"The judicial system in Pakistan has completely failed in preventing the abuse and malafide (bad faith) use of the blasphemy laws in Pakistan,” the report quoted Hina Jilani, a leading human rights lawyer and activist in Pakistan.
“While there are concerns regarding the laws as they are currently framed, the way that courts disregard the few procedural safeguards that were added to the legal framework has rendered prosecution in such cases farcical and an epitome of injustice,” stated Jilani, a recipient of the American Society of International Law award.
The report highlighted that some cases do not even go to trial, with mob violence against those accused of blasphemy on the rise.
Pakistani officials did not immediately respond to the CFJ findings, which came ahead of the United Nations Human Rights Committee's review of the country, scheduled for October 17.
Islamabad has consistently rejected foreign criticism of its blasphemy laws, calling it an internal matter for Pakistan to deal with.
The report came just days after a police officer in the southwestern province of Balochistan shot and killed a man who was being held in custody on blasphemy allegations. The victim, a Muslim, was arrested a day earlier for allegedly making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad.
In June, a 73-year-old Pakistani man from the minority Christian community died in a hospital a week after being violently attacked by a mob in his native Sargodha district in Punjab following accusations he insulted Islam.
Days later, on June 20, a Muslim man from Punjab was visiting the scenic Swat Valley in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa when a mob violently lynched him for allegedly desecrating Islam's holy book, the Quran.
Hundreds of suspects, mostly Muslims, are languishing in jails in Pakistan because fear of retaliation from religious groups deters judges from moving their trials forward.
The CFJ report backed long-running local and international rights groups’ concerns that the strict blasphemy laws are often misused to settle personal vendettas or to persecute Pakistani minority communities.
The organization says its CFJ legal experts are tasked to monitor criminal trials globally against those who are most vulnerable, particularly journalists, democracy defenders, women and girls, LGBTQ+ persons, and minorities.
