WASHINGTON (ABP) — An independent federal panel is asking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to intervene in the case of the latest Afghan sentenced to death under the nation's blasphemy laws.
Michael Cromartie, chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, sent Rice a letter Jan. 24 asking her to intervene in the case of 23-year-old Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh. The student and reporter is accused of downloading, printing and distributing to fellow students at Balakh University an Internet article concerning the role of women in Islam. In October, he was arrested in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif and accused of blasphemy.
In Mazar-e-Sharif and other outlying areas far from the Afghan capital, Kabul, mullahs and tribal warlords reportedly often hold more power than the nation's official justice system. Cromartie said Kambakhsh was tried by a three-judge panel of religious scholars rather than by the nation's media commission — a violation of the Afghan Constitution.
According to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a group that promotes independent war journalism, Mazar-e-Sharif officials arrested Kambakhsh in retaliation for work his younger brother had done for the institute.
“Madame Secretary, the Commission has always believed that Afghanistan's unique circumstances present the United States with a special responsibility to act in the face of such travesties of justice as has occurred in the case of Mr. Kambakhsh,” Cromartie wrote. “The U.S. government should therefore immediately contact President Hamid Karzai and other leading Afghan officials to communicate in the strongest possible terms that Mr. Kambakhsh must be freed immediately and the dubious case against him closed.
“It should reiterate that the United States vigorously supports respect for the right of every individual to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief, and that the Afghan government must protect this and other constitutionally guaranteed freedoms against charges that are clearly being used to stifle debate, including such charges [of] blasphemy, ‘offending Islam,' apostasy, or similar offenses.”
The case is the latest highly publicized effort to enforce anti-blasphemy laws in Afghanistan. Despite the U.S. ouster of the theocratic Taliban government in 2001, the nation's new constitution does not provide full religious freedom. In 2006, the nation's highest court dismissed apostasy charges against Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who converted from Islam to Christianity. He was released and forced into exile in Italy.
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