The Pakistan court that in October said Aasiya Noreen (Asia Bibi), a Christian, must die for the crime of insulting Islam, based its ruling on a legal technicality that it now wants to eliminate.
The Lahore High Court, an appeals court for Pakistan’s largest province, decided that it would let stand the 2010 conviction of Aasiya, a day-labour berry picker whose argument with a Muslim co-worker blew up into a highly-charged test of the country’s anti-blasphemy laws. The appeals judges now explain they had no choice, given the way Pakistan’s laws are written, and have turned to lawmakers to craft legislation that would empower trial courts to apply a test that would make future blasphemy convictions much more difficult to achieve. That test was not in place when Aasiya was tried.
The High Court’s detailed legal reasoning, as well as its intention to close the loophole through which it says Aasiya has fallen, is contained in a written decision that was not available when the court ruled from the bench that her original conviction will stand. In Pakistan, blasphemy against Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, carries the requirement of the death penalty, though it has never been carried out.
