Jason Koutsoukis
On the Sunday before the terrorist attacks at the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, a handful of mourners gathered at Liberty Plaza in Lahore to mark the 2011 assassination of Salman Taseer.
The then governor of Punjab, Pakistan's eastern province, Taseer was shot dead in broad daylight by his bodyguard while eating lunch at an Islamabad cafe.
Taseer deserved his fate, his killer said afterwards, because he had had the effrontery to show sympathy for Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who remains in jail awaiting execution after being sentenced to death for blasphemy. Not only had Taseer called for Bibi's pardon, he criticised as a "black law" the criminal code that saw her convicted in the first place.
Support costly: Asia Bibi with the then governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, in 2010. Photo: AFP
"We were there, burning the candle in front of [Taseer's] portrait and suddenly a group of people armed with sharp knives, Kalashnikovs and other weapons, they attacked us," says Abdullah Malik, president of Lahore's Civil Society Network.
"We ran away, to save our lives," says Malik. "They were raising slogans 'we will kill you, we will kill you. You are not Muslims. You are supporting a non-Muslim'."
Three days later, masked gunmen in another part of Punjab kidnapped 52-year-old Aabid Mehmood, another man facing blasphemy charges, who had just been released from jail on health grounds. Mehmood's bullet-ridden body was found dumped in the street the next day, just a few hours before the gunmen in Paris stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
"The blasphemy law is not perfect," says Malik, with guarded understatement. "We demand that it must be changed and our government must take steps to bring some changes to this law."
While Pakistan's constitution supposedly guarantees freedom of speech, a 1991 review of the criminal code by the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan not only upheld the then rarely invoked blasphemy laws, but upgraded the penalty for blasphemy to death.
Since then, supposed crimes of blasphemy have soared, many of them malevolent and spurious accusations more likely to be the result of personal vendetta than any actual contravention of the law.
Last year, there were more than 100 blasphemy cases registered. Since 1991, 62 people accused of blasphemy have been murdered by vigilantes, more than half of those in the last five years.
"Most reports of blasphemy have been shown to be about vendetta," says Asma Jahangir, a leading lawyer in Lahore and a former chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "I think the law is framed in such a way that it's a very open-ended way of adjudication because it's one person's word against another. And the fact that it's such an emotional subject here, it is always accompanied with violence."
Lawyers acting for those accused of blasphemy have been threatened and killed, as have judges who have failed to convict alleged blasphemers brought before their courts, creating an intimidating culture of fear and violence.
"Before this law was there, we hardly had any cases of blasphemy," says Jahangir. "It's very strange that you have the law and suddenly people begin to blaspheme, it does not make sense to me at all, so this is obviously a tool in the hands of those who want to persecute other people on a religious basis."
According to Sahaid Mehrej, the Dean of the Lahore Cathedral, Christians - who make up less than 3 per cent of Pakistan's 194 million people - are particularly vulnerable to charges of blasphemy.
"There are forces of darkness that are leading Pakistan adrift from that vision of the founder of this country," says Mehrej. "These people who are really damaging our country have guns in their hands. This is our struggle. To take away these guns, to make peace everywhere."
Asia Bibi, the Christian mother of five awaiting the death sentence for blasphemy, was a field labourer in Sheikpura, a small village 70 kilometres outside Lahore who in 2009 got into a quarrel with some co-workers after she drank from the same water vessel as them. The co-workers, two Muslim women, later told a local cleric that during the argument, Bibi had insulted the prophet.
Enraged by what he heard, the cleric, Muhammad Salam, publicly denounced Bibi, inciting mobs across the district demanding her arrest. After five days, local police placed Bibi under arrest and in November 2010 she was found guilty in the district court and sentenced to death by hanging.
That wasn't enough for some. One cleric promised 500,000 rupees (about $6000) to anyone who would kill her in jail.
"I live in a confined cell," Bibi said in an interview with a Christian rights group in 2011. "I am allowed to go out for only 30 minutes every day and allowed to meet my family for one hour every Tuesday."
Bibi is given raw food so she can cook for herself for fears she might be poisoned - in 2011 a female prison guard at the jail was suspended after she tried to strangle Bibi - and she has reportedly suffered numerous beatings.
While many blasphemy cases are thrown out by higher courts, Bibi's appeal to the High Court of Lahore was denied and now she is awaiting the outcome of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Pakistan in Islamabad which is expected to be heard next month.
Bibi's lawyer, Saif ul-Malook, who prosecuted the man who killed former Punjab governor Salman Taseer, told Fairfax Media that he believes there are strong reasons to hope that the Supreme Court will void Bibi's conviction.
"I think we have a good chance because there were a lot of faults in the original trial and a lot of legal mistakes made by the trial judge, as well as by the two judges of the High Court deciding her [first] appeal," says Malook.
Before 1991, Pakistani judges had the option of sentencing people convicted of blasphemy to life imprisonment. Now judges are compelled to impose the death sentence.
If Bibi's appeal to the Supreme Court fails, her only chance will be the personal intervention of the Pakistan President, who can commute her sentence, or even pardon her.
Speaking at his home in Lahore's military cantonment, an area secured by a series of fortified checkpoints, Malook is accompanied around-the-clock by at least two armed bodyguards.
Last May, Rashid Rehman, a lawyer representing a man accused of insulting the prophet Muhammad, was shot dead in Multan, a city south of Lahore.
"Of course, I fear for my life," says Malook. "Whenever I am on the street and someone appears to be following me, even for just a minute, the thought crosses my mind that this person has come to kill me."
Despite his efforts on behalf of Aasia Bibi, Malook is himself careful to emphasise that has no problem with Pakistan's blasphemy laws of themselves, only the capricious way they are being applied.
"The parliament of Pakistan has enacted the law, the wisdom of the whole parliament," says Malook. "This is a punishment fixed by God in the holy Koran. It can't be fixed by parliament of anyone else."
Blasphemy, Malook maintains, should remain a crime.
"If it is a free society like Australia and somebody said I want to abuse Jesus Christ or I want to abuse Moses, that means that man is mentally deranged. A normal man, why should he abuse the prophet? Even the Muslim prophet or the Christian prophet? Or a Jewish prophet? Why should he?"
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