The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), after consultation with minority leaders, has said forced conversion is “un-Islamic and unconstitutional.” According to reports, the CII believes Islam does not allow forced conversions. Last July Prime Minister Imran Khan termed the practice of forced conversions as “un-Islamic” and said there was no precedent in Islamic history for…
The Punjab Assembly in Pakistan unanimously passed a resolution asking the government to improve existing laws, or make new ones, to sternly punish blasphemers. It also called for a central screening system, like that used in Saudi Arabia, to intercept blasphemous content on social media. The resolution said the country’s current blasphemy laws were not…
University professor, Junaid Hafeez, 33, has been sentenced to death under the blasphemy law for allegedly posting derogatory remarks against Prophet Mohammed on social media. Hafeez was arrested in March 2013, but his sentence was only announced in December in the central city of Multan, where he was a university professor at the time of…
The United States has retained Pakistan on a list of countries that tolerate religious discrimination. The determination made by the US State Department on Dec 18, includes Myanmar, China, Erit¬r¬¬ea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan and Turkm¬enistan. They have all been re-designated as “Countries of Particular Concern (CPC)”. The State Department makes the…
Stephen Masih’s house has been set on fire twice in the recent month. The first incident occurred on 18th October, and the second on the 22nd. Luckily nobody was at home, so everybody is safe, but household goods have turned to ashes while the building is severely damaged. Family members who were already in hiding…
A Pakistani Christian sanitation worker was falsely accused of blasphemy. But after police intervened in the case of Amir Masih from Yousafabad, a small town near Faisalabad, the blasphemy charges against him were dropped. When collecting rubbish from local homes, Masih found a bag containing pages from the Bible and Quran. When Masih took the…
The Pakistan Supreme Court has ruled the “terrorism” as defined in the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997 is too wide. It recommended that Parliament bring changes to narrow the meaning and scope of the term. The court highlighted that the term has had been the subject of much controversy, and had been interpreted in many different ways…
