With a sensational about-face, the police registered case no. 74/21 against the Christian woman Tabitha Nazir Gill, according to article 295 C of the Pakistani Penal Code, that is, for “having used derogatory comments pronounced or written, directly or indirectly, which offend the name of Muhammad or the other prophets”. It is one of the articles of the infamous blasphemy law that makes so many victims in Pakistan and that is frequently abused and brought up for personal revenge
The merciless murder of Abida and Sajida is a tragedy that shows how the lives of religious minorities in Pakistan are held by a thread or is worthless. Rape, kidnappings, forced conversions and even murders of young Christian girls are worrying phenomena
: The judicial battle continues in the case of Arzoo Raja, the kidnapped Catholic girl, forcefully converted to Islam, forced to marry Islamic last October, then freed by the police and now living in a family home, under the control of social workers
Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have sentenced a young ethnic Kazakh wrestler to 15 years in prison for sharing a song by a Kazakhstani musician on social media, according to a former internment camp detainee. Kastar Polat, a 20-year-old man from Chaghantoqay (in Chinese, Yumin) county, in Ili Kazakh (Yili Hasake) …
A recent surge in blasphemy cases against has raised concerns among human rights groups. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has reported more than 40 cases of blasphemy in Pakistan in the month of August alone
A Senate committee in Pakistan rejected a bill calling for the protection of religious minorities and their rights which therefore will not be scheduled in the Senate’s proceedings and will not be debated or voted. As Agenzia Fides learns, the draft law, called “Protection of Rights of Minorities Bill, 2020” was presented in September by Senator Javed Abbasi, a member of the Pakistan Muslim League-N
Silsilah” Movement in the same direction is to collect and disseminate “Stories of change”: those of people who, passing joyful and painful life events, have changed their relationships with transferors of faiths other than their own and today they walk in the spirit of dialogue and solidarity
-A court in Lahore, capital of the Punjab province of Pakistan, sentenced a Christian man to death for committing “blasphemy”: Asif Pervaiz, 37, has been in prison since 2013 on charges of having sent “blasphemous” SMS text messages to employer Muhammad Saeed Khokher. As reported to the Agenzia Fides by the lawyer Saif-ul-Malook, the Muslim lawyer who also defended the Christian Asia Bibi, the court did not give credit to his testimony, in which the Christian man denied any wrongdoing, and sentenced Asif Pervaiz to death on September 8
The Islamic religious Ziauddin Manseharwi of the “Jamia Islamia Ashrafia” organization, an Islamic institute, in a message spread through social media, says: “It is not allowed to build a new temple for Hindus using government funds; building new places of worship for non-Muslims and restoring damaged temples is illegal and means cooperating in sin”
Construction for the Pakistani government-approved Shri Krishna Mandir complex in Islamabad has been halted by municipal authorities amid protest by hardline Islamic clerics and politicians who say the Hindu temple has no place in the Pakistani capital. VOA Urdu service’s Gaitty Ara Anis filed this report from Islamabad-VOA NEWS