Asia Bibi Is the Perfect Candidate for Asylum
By Matthew Sussis on November 16, 2018
As my colleague Dan Cadman has pointed out, asylum is not for people who are simply victims of everyday crimes, even if their stories are sympathetic. Rather, asylum is an extraordinary form of protection for people who are unable or unwilling to return to their country because of "persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." Asia Bibi is precisely the sort of person deserving of such protection.
For background, Bibi is a Catholic Pakistani woman who was imprisoned in Pakistan for nearly nine years and sentenced to hang for blasphemy. A Muslim woman accused her of defiling the name of the Prophet Muhammad during an argument over drinking water in 2010, although Bibi disputed that account and said it was in fact the Muslim woman who mocked Christianity. The case was effectively a she-said-she-said argument.
https://cis.org/Sussis/Asia-Bibi-Perfect-Candidate-Asylum
