A weak Christian factory worker is on the verge of execution – in the depths of a Pakistani prison cell – away from the rest of the population in Lahore’s district jail.
A judge convicted 37-year-old Asif Parvez of Inanda and sentenced him to death earlier this month. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.
“This is a tragic situation; this is the first case in Pakistan’s recent history where a Christian has been accused of refusing to accept Islam,” Pervez’s lawyer, Saif Maluk, told Fox News. “Mr. Asif, this man wanted to leave Christianity, and Asif knew he would suffer a lot by saying no. But he kept his faith.”
Attorney Saif Maluk and his client Asif Parvez, who were sentenced to death in Pakistan this month following the country’s abusive Inanda law.
(Courtesy Saif Maluk)
According to Maluk, Pervez’s nightmare was in 2013 when his supervisor, Muhammad Saeed Khokhar, worked in a garment factory where he worked, forcing him to become a Muslim on several occasions. When he refused, Khokar went to the police with the accusation that a devout Christian had sent him “blasphemous” text messages defaming the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.
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Khokhar has since denied that he tried to force his work to be secondary. In Pakistan, insulting the Prophet is a mandatory death sentence, and the court has vowed that Pervez will be “hanged to death.”
Saiful Maluk, Center, Lawyer of Christian Asif Parvez of Pakistan (AP Photo / BK Bangash)
However, the defendant categorically denied the claims, and his lawyer further argued that at that time, about seven years ago, anyone could buy a phone SIM card without revealing his identity. The law has since become stricter and chips are now required to register in Pakistan, anyone can easily claim that a text message can come without proof.
Maluk is preparing to appeal the death sentence, though he has warned his client that the process could mean years of illness behind the sentence.
“As a person, Asif has always been a special young man – very strong, and he never cried until this month when they sentenced him to death. Mentally, he feels broken,” his lawyer added. “I told him he must get his strength – it’s a long journey, he can’t survive unless he stays strong. I lied and said it would be over soon, but it would be more. Years of fighting. “
Maluk also boldly took up the Asia BB case in Pakistan, a poor Christian woman who was also convicted of blasphemy. His case has been languishing on death row for nearly 10 years through a long series of appeals and threats, before finally being released in October 2018. Months later, she fled to safety for the safety of scattered Canadians, as protests began on the streets against her acquittal.
A Pakistani Christian woman, Asia BB, poses with her diploma as a Citizen Hon Male of the City of Paris on Tuesday, February 25, 2020 at the City Hall in Paris. Bibi, who was released after serving eight years on death row in Pakistan, said she was going to seek asylum in France. (AP Photo / Michelle Euler)
And in cases like Pervez, it’s not just the accused who are the victims.
His bereaved wife – who was diagnosed with cancer – and four young children are in hiding. Since his arrest seven years ago, they have struggled to find any source of food and income – relying on pennies from local Christian charities for survival.
Watching his family break up behind the iron bars eats away at Asif’s spirit, Maluk noted.
“His wife is still very ill, almost like a skeleton, and when we met Asif she fell down and went to jail,” Maluk said hours after returning from a meeting on Friday. “The children were crying for their father; they are all under threat. Everyone is scared to be around him; it was as miserable as being a poor family.”
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International human rights organizations have long warned that in Pakistan, unsubstantiated allegations of blasphemy continue to be life-threatening – and not just in the minority Christian population. As Maluk observes, most of the Indani Muslims in the country are blamed.
Protesters chanted slogans during a rally in Lahore, Pakistan, on Friday, November 2, 2018, to condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to acquit Asia Bibi, a Christian woman serving an eight-year death sentence for blasphemy.
(AP Photo / KM Chowdhury)
Last month, Amnesty International underlined an “alarming optic” in such allegations, stressing that “strict laws enabling abuse and dangerous lives must be repealed.”
They have been used to include some marginalized people in society, children, people with mental disabilities, members of religious minorities and the poor, the Amnesty report said. “Although most of the accused are Muslims, as one percent of Pakistan’s population adheres to Islam, critics have argued that the laws extraordinarily target minorities such as Christians and Hindus who are falsely accused of discrimination rather than crime.”
Stricter laws on religion date back to 1860 when they were first empowered by the British rulers in India and were extended in 1927. When the country was born after its secession from India in 1947, Pakistan automatically got strict laws.
By the 1980s, under the rule of General Zia-ul-Haq, a series of such crimes began among the Pakistani population, which sought to “Islamize” laws on books with numerous clauses. In 1980, it was announced that he had been sentenced to three years in prison for making obscene remarks about Islamic individuals. Two years later, life imprisonment was made mandatory for those found guilty of “intentional” desecration of the Qur’an, and then in 1986, condemnation was recommended – the act or crime of speaking out against the Prophet – accompanied by the death penalty. .
According to the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP), a total of 6,776 Muslims, 505 Ahmadis, 22 Christians, Christians and Hindus0 Hindus have been charged under various sections of the Indani Act between 1777 and 2018 – with an overwhelming majority being charged with insult. Is. Than the Muslim slander of the holy text.
But even without judicial formal proceedings, this charge comes with the cost of human life. In July, Tahir Ahmed Naseem, a 54-year-old man with a mental disability, was shot dead in the Peshawar High Court as he was presented for trial on defamation charges.
A 2020 report released by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF) in April recommended that the State Department redesign Pakistan, a U.S. military ally, given the “Country of Special Concern (CPC)” In the state of religious freedom the negative attitude will continue. “
“The systematic enforcement of anti-Ahmadiyya and anti-blasphemy laws, and the authorities’ failure to take into account the mandatory conversions of religious minorities, including Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, severely restricts religion or belief,” the report said.
For many of Pakistan’s secular political parties seeking to dominate Islamabad, amending the regularly defamed law is considered the first priority, but much of the sensitivity of the hot-button issue has advanced slightly over the years.
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And for Pervez’s favorite, that means falling into a forgotten realm.
“Pakistani jails are not a good place when you can’t bribe the guards. You can’t breathe properly, and Christians will be arrested separately for blasphemy; otherwise, they will be killed,” Maluk added. “Asif has already spent seven years in prison, and we will fight his execution even though there will be many more. We need the help of the Western Christian world.”
