Pakistan's rulers are too afraid of Islamist extremists to pardon the 'blaspheming' Briton

By Rob Crilly

So Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is working the phones as part of efforts to bring home an elderly British man convicted of blasphemy in Pakistan last week. That's a good thing. Mohammad Asghar is an old man with a history of mental illness, convicted in the dodgiest of circumstances. He needs all the help he can get.

Baroness Warsi knows what she is doing. I was one of a handful of foreign hacks camped in the lobby of the Khartoum Hilton in 2007 when she and Lord Nazir Ahmed – a Labour peer – arrived on a Muslim mercy mission to free Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher jailed for blasphemy when her class named a teddy bear Mohammed.

They were granted audiences with President Omar al-Bashir to press their case. It worked. A man who seized power in an Islamist coup, who welcomed Osama bin Laden to his country, and whose forces were then engaged in a brutal repression in Darfur – a campaign that earned him arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity – saw sense and did the pragmatic thing. She was granted a presidential pardon and released.

Could that happen in the case of Mr Asghar? Almost certainly not.

Although it has a democratically elected government and benefits from hundreds of millions of pounds in British aid, such is the febrile atmosphere surrounding blasphemy that a sensible debate is impossible. Court cases are obscured by lawyers fearful of repeating contentious statements even in court and by journalists afraid of reporting them. Everyone knows there is almost always a property dispute or a personal slight at the centre of things, yet it is still a brave judge – and one not much longer for this earth – who finds a defendant not guilty.

Such is the fear of the extremists that they can claim victories on a daily basis without lifting a finger. Book launches are cancelled, newspaper stories toned down and debate stifled either by Islamist sympathisers or sensible people who have forgotten that we shouldn't bow down before terrorists.

Suggest reform of the draconian, Colonial-era laws and you will be accused of wanting to let the blasphemers run riot. One of the people on Baroness Warsi's call list was the chief minister of Punjab. He will need no reminder of what happens to Pakistani politicians who get involved in cases like these. Three years ago the governor of Punjab – the president's representative in the province – was shot dead for taking up the cause of a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy, a case revealed by The Telegraph. His killer was showered with rose petals as he arrived in court and today remains in Adiala Jail, the same prison where Mr Asghar is detained in a fragile mental and physical state. Ironic? More like tragic.