Amid rising concerns over minority persecution, Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court has instructed law enforcement to produce 13-year-old Maria Shahbaz, kidnapped, converted to Islam against her will, and married to 30-year-old Shahryar Ahmad.
The bench, led by Justices Ali Baqar Najafi and Karim Khan Agha, acted on advocate Rana Abdul Hamid’s disclosures of the July 29 incident. Lower courts in Lahore rebuffed recovery bids, escalating the matter federally.
Hamid detailed police graft enabling the magistrate’s rejection of the family’s plea. The child was manipulated into false declarations of consent and adulthood, flouting age proofs and child marriage prohibitions.
Shahbaz Masih’s account paints a harrowing picture: his daughter vanished en route to a shop, snatched by a neighbor, with FIR lodged but undermined by her staged testimony.
This mirrors a grim trend where underage girls from Christian and Hindu communities are trafficked into conversions and unions serving as rape veils. Judges routinely discount evidence, endorsing abductions.
Institutional discrimination plagues minorities via blasphemy frames, lynchings, killings, encroachments, forcible faiths, arrests, and asset demolitions. While this ruling revives hope, it exposes the need for robust legal overhauls to shield innocents from exploitation.