ICC Note:

A Christian man and his wife in Pakistan claim that their confessions to committing blasphemy are not valid because they were tortured by police into making them. In 2013, Shafqat Emmanuel and his wife Shagufta were accused of texting blasphemous messages to an imam. After their arrest, Emmanuel claims the police tortured his wife in front of him which forced him into making a false confession. Now, the couple has been sentenced to death under Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws thanks in most part to the confession the police forced out of the couple. False accusations of blasphemy are common in Pakistan and many observers state that the laws are often abused for personal gain, to settle scores, or to incite religious hatred against minority communities. Recently, Emmanuel has filed to appeal his blasphemy conviction in the Lahore High Court.  

2/18/2016 Pakistan (Daily Mail) – A disabled Christian man and his wife sentenced to death in Pakistan for blasphemy have claimed they were tortured into confessing.

Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar, from Gojra, east Pakistan, were found guilty of sending a text message which ‘blasphemed’ against the Prophet Mohammed to their local imam in 2013.

Mr. Emmanuel, who is paralyzed from the waist down, claims the only reason he confessed to the crime was because he could not stand watching his wife be tortured by police.

‘There is no man who can stand to see his wife being tortured by police, so to save my wife, I confessed,’ Mr. Emmanuel said in an appeal for bail lodged this week.

The couple were arrested in July 2013 after their local imam, Maulvi Mohammed Hussain, claimed Mr. Emmanuel had used his wife’s phone to send him a text insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

The couple, who have four children, denies ever sending the text, saying the phone had been stolen from them months before the message was supposed to have been sent.

“There was no evidence that the text messages came from a phone owned by the couple,’ Farukh Saif, an official of World Vision in Progress giving legal aid to the couple, told Christians in Pakistan.

In the first place they had lost the phone some months before July 2013 and secondly there was no SIM card in their names.

The only evidence police produced was a bill for a SIM card from a shop owner which is unheard of.’

Mr. Emmanuel and Ms. Kausar were initially sentenced to death for blasphemy, but as with nearly all such convictions, it is most likely they will spend the rest of their lives in jail.

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are notoriously harsh, and accusations of blasphemy against Islam is taken very seriously in the country.

Being found guilty of desecrating the Koran or blaspheming against the Prophet Mohammed is punishable by death or life imprisonment.

The laws have long been criticized both in Pakistan and internationally as they are often used to settle personal grudges and accusations are made with little to no evidence.

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