Two men accused of burning a Pakistani Christian couple alive have been cleared of being involved in their deaths. On Thursday the Lahore High Court acquitted the men in relation to the 2014 killing of Shahzad and Shama Masih in Kot Radha Kishan. The couple were burned alive in a brick kiln by a frenzied…
A petition calling for the Bible to be included in the curriculum for Christian children who are studying in government educational institutions has been moved in the Islamabad High Court. The petitioner, Anil Mansoor, told the court Islamic study is a compulsory subject for all students from first to eighth grade, but that thousands of…
After spending eight years on death row, she had to wait six months in hiding after being acquitted of blasphemy charges. But Bibi is now believed to have joined her family in Canada. Protests by radical extremists erupted across Pakistan after her death sentence was overturned and she was cleared of blasphemy charges, meaning she…
A young Pakistani Christian man has been cleared of blasphemy and released from police custody. Farhan Aziz Masih, of Muslim town, Gujranwala, was charged with blasphemy and has been cleared and released by police on April 30th. Farhan was accused of committing blasphemy by his next-door neighbour, and local police charged him under 295-C which…
The Pakistani Senate has passed a bill to amend the Child Marriage Restraint Bill, 1929, and set the minimum marriage age at 18 years. The bill aims to “curb the menace of child marriage prevalent in the country and save women from exploitation”. Underage marriage can lead to a sentence of up to three years…
A revised draft of a forced conversion bill will be submitted to the Sindh Assembly soon. More than two years after the first draft was presented, the latest version of the ‘Protection of Minorities Act, 2019’ will be submitted by the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) MPA Nand Kumar Goklani. In 2016 the Sindh Assembly passed…
A Pakistani court has ordered that a Christian teenage girl, who was abducted and forcibly converted to Islam after being made to marry a Muslim man in February, be handed over to her parents. Shalat Masih, 14, was produced by police at Lahore High Court and said that she was abducted from Faisalabad and later…
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said Asia Bibi is fine and will soon be leaving the country. Christian Asia Bibi was sentenced to death by hanging in 2010 after being accused of blasphemy. But the conviction was overturned by Pakistan’s Supreme Court last year. It upheld the decision to overturn her conviction and death…
Two bills have been submitted to the National Assembly secretariat in Pakistan seeking to increase punishment for those involved kidnapping and forced conversion, and making child marriage a cognisable offence. The move comes amid ongoing controversy surrounding the alleged kidnapping of two Hindu girls and their forced conversion to Islam. Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) lawmaker Dr…
The Hindu community in Pakistan has protested against the kidnapping of two underage girls. Hindus in Daharki taluka of Sindh’s Ghotki district staged a sit-in, after which a video claiming the two girls had converted to to Islam went viral on social media. In it they claimed no one had forced them to convert, and…
