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Image: Martin Bureau / AFP / Getty Images / World Watch Monitor
Shafqat Emmanuel (top left) and Shagufta Kausar (bottom left) are the first Pakistani Christians on death row to be acquitted of blasphemy after Asia Bibi (right).
The Pakistani Christian woman who replaced Asia Bibi in her prison cell on death row, Shaguftah Kausar, has after a dozen delays since April 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic been acquitted from the death penalty by the Lahore high court.
The mother of four, along with her disabled husband, Shafqat Emmanuel, was arrested for blasphemy in 2013 and sentenced to death in 2014. Despite both being illiterate, the Catholic couple, surnamed Masih , were convicted of sending blasphemous texts in English to Islamic clerics.
UNPO Position on EU-Pakistan Relations
The UNPO welcomes the potential intiative of the European Parliament to enact an Urgency Resolution on Pakistan. It requests that the European Parliament looks not only at the government of Pakistan s actions, but also at the whether the EU, itself, is tacitly complicit in human rights violations in Pakistan as a result of the continuation of its current trade and aid relationship with the country.
The UNPO understands that the European Parliament is particularly concerned about the use of the blasphemy law to target religious minorities and to order and enact death sentences. On March 10, the Lahore High Court increased the sentence of Sajjad Masih from life imprisonment to death, for sending supposedly blasphemous text messages. The appeal of Shagufta Kausar and Shafqat Emmanuel, who have been imposed the death penalty for similar text messages, has been continually delayed, to-date for over six years.