Afghan president praises decision to release Abdul Rahman

Posted: 4/05/06

Afghan president praises decision to release Abdul Rahman

By Robert Marus

ABP Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (ABP)—Afghanistan’s president praised his government for releasing a Christian who had been threatened with death for abandoning Islam.

Hamid Karzai said the nation’s judiciary was right not to bow to pressure from Muslim clerics and elected leaders, who had called for 41-year-old Abdul Rahman to be executed because of his conversion more than 14 years ago.

“This was a sensitive issue for Muslims, but—thanks to God—at a time when emotions were running high, the courts weren’t influenced by these feelings,” Karzai said in an address to judicial officials in Kabul, the Associated Press reported. “They made their decision, and it was the right decision.”

On March 26, Afghanistan’s Supreme Court dismissed the government’s case against Rahman. Legal officials gave conflicting reasons for the dismissal, citing a lack of evidence against him and a belief that he may be mentally unfit to stand trial.

Rahman was freed and went into immediate hiding March 27. He is now in Italy, where officials offered him asylum. Afterwards, hundreds of Afghans protested the release, as did the nation’s parliament, in a non-binding vote.

Rahman converted to Christianity while working for a Christian aid group in Pakistan in the early 1990s. He was only recently jailed after court leaders learned of his faith in a child-custody battle with his ex-wife.

Since his imprisonment made headlines, groups from multiple faiths, continents and political ideologies have decried the Afghan judicial system for the situation. Conservative Christian groups and impartial human-rights organizations in the United States first called attention to the situation but were joined by international human-rights groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the New York Times editorial board.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to Karzai to assure Rahman’s safety. But Karzai said at the time that he could do nothing without violating the separation of powers between Afghanistan’s executive and judicial branches of government.

The Afghan Constitution, drafted and approved in the wake of the nation’s liberation from the theocratic Taliban regime in 2001, has separate sections protecting religious freedom and establishing Islam as the supreme law of the land. Religious-freedom watchdog groups repeatedly warned that the tension between the two provisions would provide too much leeway to conservative Muslim jurists in cases such as Rahman’s.

According to Compass Direct, an evangelical Protestant group that monitors persecution of Christians worldwide, at least two other Afghans Christians have been jailed in recent days. The agency declined to disclose details about the cases.