Set to hear an appeal against former university lecturer death sentence on March 19, the Lahore High Court (LHC) will convene on Saturday.
On blasphemy allegations, Hafeez, a former visiting lecturer at the Bahauddin Zakariya University (BZU), was sentenced to death by a Multan district and sessions court on December 21, 2019.
Hafeez, formerly a visiting lecturer at the BZU’s Department of English Literature in Multan, was booked on blasphemy allegations and taken under police custody on March 13, 2013. Beginning January 2014, the case underwent trial.
A cause list released by the LHC indicates that the criminal appeal would be handled on March 19 ( Wednesday) by a division bench headed by Justice Shehram Sarwar and including Justice Sardar Akbar Ali.
Hafeez, who was also working on a master degree in English literature, was charged with blasphemy over Facebook posts, claims Amnesty International.
The court decided Hafeez guilty of all charges under Section 295-A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs); life term under Section 295-B (defining, etc, of Holy Quran); death sentence under Section 295-C (use of derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet); Pakistan Penal Code (PPC).
Apart from death sentence, Additional District and Sessions Judge Kashif Qayyum had also fined Rs0.5 million under section 295-C and Rs0.1 million under section 295-A of the PPC accordingly. Should default occur, Hafeez would have to spend an extra one-year incarceration.
Under Section 295-B, he was also sentenced to life in jail; under Section 295-A of the PPC, he was fined Rs100,000 and imprisoned ten years rigorously. As decided by the court, all penalties were to run consecutively.
The decision rendered to the scholarly dismay the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan remarked.
As of the announcement of his sentence, Hafeez has been deposited in the second high-security ward of New Central Jail Multan.
Fearing for their son’s mental and physical wellbeing, the lecturer’s parents had appealed to then-chief justice of Pakistan Asif Saeed Khosa one month before the punishment was decided upon. According to them, Hafeez had been suffering in solitary detention on spurious blasphemy accusations since 2013.
The progress of Hafeez’s case saw at least seven judges moved. While 11 prosecution witnesses were not called after being pronounced irrelevant, as many as 15 recorded their comments against Hafeez.
Security issues caused the trial to be transferred in April 2014 to the Multan Central Jail by the Punjab home department.
at May 2014 Hafeez’s former attorney, Rashid Rehman, was shot dead at his office. The month before it, the HRCP voiced grave concerns when death threats were directed against Rehman, also the commission’s special task force coordinator.
Another attorney defending Hafeez also got a threat letter from the violent Islamic State group in December 2014, advising him to drop out of the lawsuit.
