Afghanistan: Death Sentence for Distributing Blog Article Parwez Kambakhsh was detained by the authorities on October 27, 2007 for downloading and distributing an article that he found on an Iranian weblog to friends. It spoke of women’s rights, the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed. A local court in northern Afghanistan in Mazar-e Sharif has convicted him to death for the alleged blasphemy. Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders say the trial was “carried out in haste and without any concern for the law or for free expression, which is protected by the constitution.”
Index on Censorship says : "Deeply conservative Afghan clerics, most of whom have never used a computer or the Internet, believe Kambakhsh himself wrote the article and therefore found him guilty of blasphemy. Because there is no clear punishment for downloading “un-Islamic” articles from the Internet, the primary court of appeal asked clerics to comment. The conservative clerics, who had not investigated the case, demanded the death penalty."
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Parwez Kambakhsh was detained by the authorities on October 27, 2007 for downloading and distributing an article that he found on an Iranian weblog to friends. It spoke of women’s rights, the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed. A local court in northern Afghanistan in Mazar-e Sharif has convicted him to death for the alleged blasphemy.
Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders say the trial was “carried out in haste and without any concern for the law or for free expression, which is protected by the constitution.”
Index on Censorship says : "Deeply conservative Afghan clerics, most of whom have never used a computer or the Internet, believe Kambakhsh himself wrote the article and therefore found him guilty of blasphemy. Because there is no clear punishment for downloading “un-Islamic” articles from the Internet, the primary court of appeal asked clerics to comment. The conservative clerics, who had not investigated the case, demanded the death penalty."
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