THE RECENT ASSASSINATION of lawyer and human rights activist Rashid Rehman — who claimed he had received repeated death threats after agreeing to defend Junaid Hafeez, an adjunct lecturer at the Bahauddin Zakariya University, against charges of blasphemy — has raised wide concerns about academic freedom in Pakistan.
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In response to the killing in Multan on May 7, the Scholars at Risk Network (SRN) in New York issued a statement saying “Rehman had taken up the case in 2013 when previous defense counsel withdrew after similar threats” and then goes on to highlight the concerns raised by the assassination. “In addition to the deprivation of the right to life of the victim and harm to the others injured, their families and associates, an attack on defense counsel deprives defendants of due process and a fair trial,” the statement adds. “Where the defendant is a scholar detained for non-violent expressive activity, as in this case, an attack on defense counsel also undermines academic freedom by denying the scholar a full and fair defense and sending a message of intimidation throughout the university community and society.”
In the Education under Attack, 2014 report by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (of which SRN is a member), Pakistan is cited as one of six most “heavily affected” countries for violence against schools and universities. Hundreds of attacks were documented between 2009-12, and one student and four academics were killed.
Clare Robinson, SRN’s director of protection services, notes the network has logged three other attacks on higher education since November: a Shia imam and professor at Hashmat Ali College killed by unidentified gunmen; a professor at the University of Gujrat, said to have been “progressive-minded” as well as Shia, shot dead with his driver on the way to work; and a first-year student at Khyber Medical College allegedly harassed and assaulted by an academic because she wore a face veil.
To put this in a wider context, Robinson adds that “SNR has been contacted by over 65 applicants reporting threats in Pakistan”. Rehman was “representing someone who was a lecturer and a student and working in the field of gender studies — all of which raise questions about wider threats to academic freedom in Pakistan”.
She says that SNR fears that Hafeez “will never get the representation he needs for a fair trial. His other lawyers were threatened and asked to step down, which they did. No one has been held accountable for those threats, nor, to the best of my knowledge, for the threats issued to Rehman. Such threats also need to be taken seriously.”
Campaigners argue that Pakistan’s strict laws against blasphemy, which theoretically carry the death penalty, are often used to settle personal scores or deployed by right-wingers keen to silence liberals. “We have seen a handful of recent cases regarding blasphemy,” agrees Robinson, “which risk eroding the rule of law.”
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)