Asia Bibi: The Death Sentence That Put Pakistan's Blasphemy Law on Trial

Asia Bibi, a Christian farm laborer from Sheikhupura district in Pakistan's Punjab, was sentenced to death by a court in Nankana Sahib on November 7, 2010, under Pakistan's blasphemy law — the first Christian woman condemned under the statute, and the case that would make the law itself the subject of a global debate.

The case began in June 2009, in the fields where Bibi worked alongside Muslim women picking berries. Asked to fetch water, she drank from a shared bowl — and by the women's account the cup was contaminated, because she was Christian. The argument that followed ended with an accusation that she had spoken blasphemously about the Prophet Muhammad. Bibi denied the charge. She was arrested, tried, and condemned.

Within days of the sentence, the case had escaped the courtroom. Punjab Governor Salman Taseer visited Bibi in jail and said he would ask President Asif Ali Zardari to pardon her. Pope Benedict XVI appealed publicly for her release. Human rights organizations that had long documented the blasphemy law's use against religious minorities — Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus — and against Muslims targeted by rivals settling personal scores, held the case up as the law's clearest test.

The statute carries a mandatory death sentence for insulting the Prophet, and even the accusation alone has repeatedly proved enough to destroy lives. Bibi's trial, human rights observers said at the time, had been conducted in an atmosphere of local hostility incompatible with a fair proceeding.

In November 2010, the question was immediate: whether the Pakistani state could protect a poor Christian farmworker from a law that the mob had learned to wield.