The courageous Pakistan supreme court judges who quashed Asia Bibi’s blasphemy conviction face the very real threat of assassination. Furious Islamists were hoping for a hanging in the near future, and their blood-lust has not yet been sated.
.... Even as the supreme court was hearing Ms Bibi’s case, the European Court of Human Rights was considering its own blasphemy appeal. Unlike the Pakistani judges, they made a hash of it.
.... The ECHR upheld her conviction, not merely on the narrow ground that Austrians should be free to have blasphemy laws if they want them, but on the astonishing and legally nonsensical principle that the freedom of religion guaranteed by Article 9 creates a “duty to suppress certain forms of conduct or expression that [are] gratuitously offensive and profane”.
It was “gratuitously offensive,” said the judges, to claim that marrying a child made Muhammad a paedophile; not because it is absurd to apply 21st-century standards to the 7th century, but because he remained married to her after she became an adult, something a paedophile would not have done.
Rabble-rousers bray that there is now a “European blasphemy law protecting Islam”. There is not. Yet to hear the court explaining why European countries have a “duty to suppress” insults to religion, even while Pakistan’s judges were considering whether Ms Bibi should hang, was profoundly depressing. [The Times (£)] Read more
