A court in Pakistan has handed custody of a 16-year-old Christian girl to an unrelated Muslim woman after the minor was recovered from a Muslim accused of abducting, forcibly converting and marrying her, her family’s attorney said.
After multiple legal setbacks, relatives of a Christian girl who was forcibly converted to Islam and married to her Muslim kidnapper are hoping Pakistan’s highest constitutional court will revisit a controversial ruling that upheld the marriage, her family’s lawyer said.
A court in Pakistan on Monday (July 13) sentenced the first person to be convicted for anti-Christian violence in Jaranwala in August 2023, handing him 10 years in prison while acquitting 13 others due to flawed investigations, sources said.
Pakistan’s Supreme Court last week overturned the death sentences of the remaining three men convicted in the 2014 lynching of a Christian couple burned alive after being falsely accused of blasphemy, sources said.
Entrenched corruption across Pakistan’s criminal justice system disproportionately affects poor and marginalized communities, particularly Christians prosecuted under the country’s controversial blasphemy laws, according to a new report.
Officials in Pakistan last week reported to a parliamentary committee that a majority of 333 blasphemy cases registered in the past five years in four provinces were fabricated, according to media reports.
A violent protest erupted in Karachi, Pakistan on Thursday (July 9) after unidentified persons mailed a desecrated page of the Quran to a Muslim shopkeeper along with photographs of a Christian and his mother, sources said.
More than two dozen Christian families were forced to flee their homes in Pakistan last week after allegations of blasphemy against a pastor living in the United States triggered fears of mob violence, sources said.
A court in Pakistan on Monday (July 6) acquitted a Catholic accused of blasphemy, his lawyer said.
Three weeks after the kidnapping of Scripture Union Nigeria’s national general director in southeast Nigeria, he and seven other fellowship leaders remain missing, according to reports.
Suspected Fulani herdsmen on Thursday (June 25) raided two Christian villages in the same area of Kaduna state, Nigeria, killing two Christians, kidnapping seven others and injuring dozens of others, residents said.
A 61-year-old Catholic in Pakistan suffering from advanced dementia died on Wednesday (July 1) after nearly a year in jail awaiting trial on a false blasphemy charge, sources said.
