After the Mashal Khan’s lynching incident, the state should have built a narrative against the practice of taking law into one’s own hands. Blasphemy law should have been reformed but the state did quite the opposite — it started using these laws to muzzle criticism.
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| Taimoor Raza |
Source/Credit: Daily Times
By Editorial | June 12, 2017
Last weekend, a Pakistani citizen was sentenced to death for sharing blasphemous content on social media. Reportedly, Taimoor Raza — member of Shia community — had engaged in a contentious debate on Facebook.The counter terrorism department arrested him last year and the state has prosecuted him under charges of blasphemy and terrorism.
That Taimoor Raza was booked under anti-terrorism laws is even more worrying.Such laws have long been misused to include cases, which have nothing to do with terrorism. Why do these anti-terror laws become so ineffectual when a member of a militant group is charged under them? The courts have acquitted mass murderers and terrorists several times because of ‘lack of evidence’, but the justice system works rather swiftly when an allegation of blasphemy is made. An example of failure of Pakistan’s anti-terror laws and the justice system is the way the state got rid of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) chief Malik Ishaq, who was killed in a police encounter because the courts kept releasing him, despite Ishaq’s confessions of murdering many Shias and vowing to kill more. The weak justice system of Pakistan fails to bring terrorists to book and only goes after alleged ‘blasphemers’.
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