Human rights defender asks the West not to forget persecuted Christians in Pakistan

Persecuted Christians in Pakistan need the West to push for their rights to be respected, and an end to forced conversions of girls and unjust sentences under the blasphemy law, said Joseph Janssen, a Pakistani and founder of Voice for Justice..

According to the religious freedom report of the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), of the 208 million inhabitants of Pakistan96.47% profess Islam and 1.9% Christianity. The rest are divided between Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and members of other local religions.

Although the country was founded in 1947 as a secular state, in the 1970s Islamic law began to play an increasingly important role in the legal system. The most relevant decision was when the 1973 Constitution established Islam as the State religion.

And although the Constitution itself states that religious minorities have the right to freely practice their faith and develop their cultures, Janssen warns that reality has shown that Christians live under two different schemes.

The first is that the authorities allow them to celebrate their worship under “certain limits”, within the temples and their facilities, but at the same time Christians and other minorities are victims of mistreatment and abuse that has ended in the burning of churches, houses and arrests.

“Legally there is discrimination, large-scale persecution that restricts them. There are a series of prohibitions with which, legally, this persecution is allowed,” he indicated, adding that the majority of Christians “are unaware that these are violations of religious freedom.”

During the dialogue with ACI Prensa—in the framework of a meeting organized by ACN Colombia—the founder of Voice for Justice He pointed out that one of the greatest burdens placed on minorities is the blasphemy law.

He explained that the main problem with this law is that “there is no definition of blasphemy,” which means that any situation can be considered an attack on Islam or the Prophet Muhammad and lead a person to be sentenced to death.

The best-known case is that of Asia Bibi, who between 2010 and 2018 was sentenced to death for having drunk water from a cup that was used by her Muslim companions, who considered her impure for being Christian. After years of appeals and international pressure, she was finally released and currently lives with her family outside Pakistan.

For this reason, Janssen warned that this lack of definition makes it not strange that a person “who was burning papers” has been accused of blasphemy “because in one of these there were words in Arabic” and that the complainant considered it part of the Koran and, therefore , it was an attack on Islam.

And although none of the accused have been executed so far, the founder of Voice for Justice indicated that “the blasphemy law is like a sword that hangs over the heads of Christians” and that it brings suffering to those who are sentenced.

A few years ago there was an attempt by the then Minorities Minister, the Catholic Shahbaz Bhatti, to reform this legislation. However, on March 2, 2011, he was murdered by three Muslims while on his way to work.

But in addition to this law, another hardship suffered by religious minorities is the kidnapping of girls to force them to convert to Islam and marry them to Muslims.

Although in July of this year an amendment The Christian Marriage Law established that the minimum age for marriage is 18 years, this only applies to the capital, Islamabad.

In that sense, according to Janssen, “there is an estimate that every year a thousand minors from religious minorities are kidnapped to be raped and converted to Islam.” Although in isolated cases the judges have agreed with the parents, mostly “they agree with the kidnappers.”

For this reason, the founder of Voice for Justice called on the West to become more involved in the defense of persecuted Christians in Pakistan. “The international community has power, it has the opportunity to talk about these people,” as was the case with Asia Bibi, he noted.