On Dec. 21, a Pakistani court sentenced the 33-year-old writer Junaid Hafeez to death on a fabricated charge of insulting the Holy Prophet. Earlier this year, Vice President Mike Pence, speaking at the Annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington, denounced the prosecution of Hafeez on unsubstantiated blasphemy charges.
This case is a grave threat to academic freedom — Hafeez is a scholar with a long record of academic accomplishment.
In 2009, Hafeez was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study literature and theater in the United States, where he obtained a master’s degree. He returned to Bahauddin Zakariya University in Pakistan as a lecturer in 2011. Apart from teaching, he worked on English translations of Urdu documents, directed and acted in a few plays, and even appeared on television.
By 2013, Hafeez’s talents made him a leading contender for a permanent faculty position advertised by the English department. This was when his troubles started. His hiring was strongly opposed by an Islamist group that accused him of expressing liberal views on social media. The group initially sought to sabotage his candidacy in favor of Islamist candidates. When this failed, they accused Hafeez of blasphemy.
Such accusations, frequently used to settle disputes in Pakistan, have dire consequences.
Before 1980, blasphemy was punished by fines or, in extreme cases, by a few years in jail. Articles of the penal code that punish blasphemy by death were introduced between 1980 and 1986 by the Islamist ruler of Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. They were praised by religious fanatics who often kill people accused of blasphemy inside prisons, on the way to trials, or even after acquittal.
In March 2013, Hafeez was arrested for supposedly violating a section of the Pakistan Penal Code criminalizing derogatory remarks about the Holy Prophet. His first lawyer abandoned him after receiving death threats. For a few months, nobody dared to take the case until Rashid Rehman, a lawyer with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, agreed to defend Hafeez.
At the hearing held in April 2014, the prosecutor threatened Hafeez’s lawyer in front of the presiding judge. Rehman was told that he might not be around to participate in the next hearing. One month later, he was assassinated in his office by two armed men who were never found. Meanwhile, Hafeez was attacked by other prisoners and placed in solitary confinement, where he spent five and a half years before trial.
The loss of the second lawyer delayed the court proceedings. The case was transferred from one judge to another. Eight judges total were involved.
Additionally, the blasphemy charges against Hafeez led to his family being ostracized. His father lost his business, and the never-ending imprisonment of his eldest son took a hard toll on him. In 2017, he suffered a heart attack. After years in solitary confinement, Hafeez’s health deteriorated too.
Human rights organizations throughout the world demanded Hafeez’s release. After the news broke that the trial was near, hope grew that Hafeez would be acquitted. The brutality of the sentence delivered to a young Pakistani writer by the court in Multan came as a grim surprise to almost everybody.
Government lawyer Airaz Ali called it a “victory of truthfulness and righteousness.” Even more shocking was the jubilant reaction to the court’s decision by members of the government's prosecution team, who chanted “Allahu akbar” and distributed sweets to celebrate the sentence.
This is the same Pakistani government responsible for roughly 150 nuclear warheads. Their lack of respect for free speech poses a grave threat not just to dissidents in their country but to global peace and human rights.
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