SC throws out plea challenging Rimsha Masih’s acquittal

A three-member bench of Pakistan’s Supreme Court on January 15 dismissed a petition challenging the quashing of charges against a teenage Christian girl accused of desecrating the Holy Quran in September last year.

The three-member bench comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, Justice Azmat Saeed and Justice Gulzar Ahmed threw out a petition by Malik Ammad which claimed that the police had shown bias in investigating the charges against 14-year-old Rimsha Masih, who was falsely accused of burning pages of the Holy Quran in the Meherabadi locality in federal capital Islamabad.

Rimsha’s lead counsel, Tahir Naveed Chaudhry told Pakistan Today that the three-member bench disposed off the challenge to Rimsha’s acquittal, saying that the Islamabad High Court had judged the case on merit and it was quite evident that cleric Khalid Jadoon Chishti had tampered the evidence to implicate the Christian girl in a false case.

“The SC’s decision has put an end to future contentions on the case,” said an ecstatic Chaudhry.

The lawyer, who is also a lawmaker of the Punjab Assembly, said that Rimsha Masih and her family were being kept in a safe house for now “but we will consider relocating them to some other city so that they can resume their normal lives now that the case has reached its logical end”.

Earlier, while giving his verdict in the case, Islamabad High Court Chief Justice Iqbal Hameedur Rahman issued a 15-page judgement in which he threw out the case registered against Rimsha and urged Muslims to be extraordinarily “careful” while levelling such allegations. He said putting Rimsha on trial would have seen the courts “used as a tool for ulterior motive”.

An official medical report classified Rimsha as being uneducated and said she was 14, but has a younger mental age. Other reports have suggested she is as young as 11 and suffering from Down’s Syndrome.

Campaigners say blasphemy laws, which were tightened during the rule of former president Ziaul Haq and which carry the death penalty, are routinely used to settle scores that have nothing to do with religion. While there are no records of anyone convicted being executed, many people accused of blasphemy have been killed before their case reached the courts.

Christian campaigners claim more than 30 people suspected of blasphemy have been killed by mobs or vigilantes over the past 20 years.