Tilly and I just now finished publishing another remhurl – “remhurl” is our abbreviation for ready-made human rights letter” – and then the next email I saw told me that today is International Women’s Day. So I thought I’d tell you about the remhurl, because it concerns a woman who was supporting her disabled husband and their four children. She and her husband were accused of sending blasphemous text message even though they are illiterate, were sentenced to death by hanging, and have been waiting eight years in prison for their appeal to be heard, because judges are scared that they too will get death threats if they so much as hear an appeal for an accused blasphemer. You can see her face (rather blurred because the photo I found was small) by clicking here.
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Good post, and great comments. Agree with Milt (great satirical comment, with a warning), Guy and Mark here. I also think it’s good Pope Francis is (was, by now) in Iraq, conversing with Muslim religious leaders.
Curiously, here in the United States many people want to abolish the Rule of Law and adopt a more “equitable,” Pakistani-like system of justice in its place.
While the Rule of Law was specifically designed to protect the most powerless members of society such as Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar, its detractors point out that it is inherently racist and unduly privileges certain classes of people based on their own narrow cultural histories and perspectives. Instead, everyone must be treated as a member of a group, and their fates determined according to tribal standards of what is fair and just depending on the intersectionality of their lived experience.
Likewise, anyone who criticizes any aspect of non-Western approaches to justice (such as warrantless arrests, lengthy detention without trial, and blasphemy statutes) is guilty of cultural aggression, an act that is far worse than anything that might befall individuals within their own local frameworks of justice.
For these reasons, any attempt to intervene on behalf of Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar is both racist and highly offensive to the indigenous people of Pakistan. Rest assured — as they would be the first to remind us — that their standard of justice is much superior to ours, and God willing, it may soon enough be operative here in the US as well.
(Be careful what you wish for…)
I’ve long wrestled with this tension between cultural rights (my main cause for a long time, because of sympathy with indigenous peoples and minorities) and universal human rights. I think there is a full reconciliation to be found. It has probably been expressed somewhere by philosophers of human rights, such as Mort Winston (once chair of the board of Amnesty International USA) but I haven’t yet formulated it for myself.
In the case of Shafqat and Shagufta, the rights coincide. Their universal right is not to be executed. They are members of a minority culture, the Christian, which has the right to be respected by the Pakistani Muslim majority.
Pope Francis is in Iraq right now, reconciling cultures.
Great and good thing to spread the word on. Places where the judges and politicians are afraid to do the right thing and administrate justly due to fear is the place where the Cancel Culture leads us to. Justice should be fearless and not indebted to people or public (or extremist positions). Being killed by extremists tho, seems to have a chilling effect. Really good post.