Trial no triumph of religious tolerance

It is good news that Pakistan’s Supreme Court has acquitted and freed a Christian woman who had already spent eight years on death row for blasphemy. In a 56-page ruling, the three judges said Asia Bibi, a farmworker in her early 50s, was the victim of mob justice aroused by unsubstantiated claims of what she said about Prophet Muhammad in an exchange with women angry that she had sipped water from a cup used by Muslims.

Though the trial was a farce, overturning it took courage. In 2011, the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, who had campaigned for Bibi’s release and for changes in the blasphemy laws, was shot and killed by his bodyguard. Two months later, the minister of minorities, the sole Christian in the Pakistani government, who had also called for the changes, was killed.

The announcement of the Supreme Court ruling set off protests across Pakistan and a warning from Islamist firebrands that the judges were risking death. Bibi has been in hiding since her release and may have to flee Pakistan.

But this is not a story about the triumph of tolerance over antiquated law. Bibi was freed not because the court found that the blasphemy law violated her rights or was in any other way inherently wrong, but because the trial was flawed. Blasphemy, broadly defined as speaking insultingly about God or religion, remains a capital crime in Pakistan and illegal in many other lands.

Sacrilege is painful to religious believers everywhere. But broad and subjective legal proscriptions not only contradict the fundamental right to freedom of expression, they also open the door to persecution of minority faiths or political dissidents. In Russia, Pussy Riot was imprisoned for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, though their target was not religion but Vladimir Putin.

History supplies ample evidence that when religions proclaim themselves beyond criticism or challenge, there is hell to pay. /New York, November 13