Junaid Hafeez and I both turned 40 years old this year. I cannot help but notice that the earlier years of his life bear some resemblance to mine. Like Junaid, I was awarded the Fulbright scholarship to spend a semester at a college in the US. Like Junaid, I lived in Rajanpur, Punjab, although briefly. And like Junaid, I dropped out of medical school to pursue a degree in social sciences.
This is where the similarities end.
At 27, I was high-spirited and eager to take on the world. At 27, he must have felt the same, I imagine—that his life was brimming with possibility. But it was at this age that Hafeez was accused of blasphemy.
Today, thirteen years later, he spends his days in a cell six feet by eight, with a toilet in the same space. “Sanitary conditions are not at all good,” says Asad Jamal, one of his lawyers. “The door provides the air to enter, and there is a very, very small outlet too.” Jamal says that Hafeez’s cell is located in a wing reserved for high-risk inmates, men accused of terrorism, and others whose trials are held inside prison because they cannot be safely transported to court. Jamal described Hafeez’s routine in 2019: “No one to talk to. The only time he opens his mouth is when the family comes to meet him. Little time for physical exercise. Total concrete, no trees. Surveillance 24 hours, no privacy.“
After completing his Master’s degree, Hafeez joined Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan as a lecturer of English Literature while he also wrote poetry. A 2010 interview on FM103 captures his youthful romanticism. Despite the considerable influence of dogmatic and conservative voices on campus, Hafeez was committed to inculcating critical thinking among his students and had managed to carve out a space for independent academic inquiry.
In 2013, however, some of his students accused both him and Shirin Zubair, the head of department at that time, of blasphemy. They mobilized religious groups on campus and distributed pamphlets calling for his arrest and removal as faculty. Given the security threat associated with such accusations, Zubair left the country soon after. But Hafeez believed that he would be able to prove his innocence. Acting on the advice of friends, Hafeez decided to leave Multan on March 13, 2013. But as soon as he arrived in Lahore on a bus service, he was arrested and brought back to Multan. A First Information Report (FIR) had been registered against him earlier the same day.
This swiftness of his arrest was made possible by the fact that in Pakistan, cases of blasphemy are legally considered “cognisable.” For background, Pakistani law classifies criminal offences in two categories: cognisable and non-cognisable. When an offense is cognisable, the police can make an arrest as soon as an FIR is registered, without any warrant.
By contrast, when an offense is non-cognisable, the police are not permitted to investigate the case without a magistrate’s order. After the investigation is conducted, again it is a magistrate who decides whether an arrest warrant should be issued. Blasphemy is thus grouped with crimes such as murder, rape, and terrorism.
Once someone is accused of blasphemy, everyone associated with the accused, including family, friends, and legal counsel, is under credible threat of mob violence. As a result, Hafeez’s family struggled to find legal representation for his defense. The first counsel to represent him dropped the case amidst threats in June 2013. Some time later, Rashid Rehman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) finally took up his case, even though he was threatened as well. The ICJ reported that Rehman was threatened by at least one of the prosecuting attorneys at a trial in 2014, who went so far as to warn him that he would not live to attend the next hearing. According to Amnesty International, the HRCP wrote to the Punjab government requesting security but no action was taken. On May 7, 2014, Rehman was killed in his office by gunmen. On the day of his burial, leaflets claiming that Rehman had met his “rightful end” were distributed and the person leading his funeral prayers was threatened.
After Rehman’s murder, Asad Jamal, a human rights lawyer, took up Hafeez’s case. Jamal met Hafeez for the first time in September 2014. “He was young, and when I met him he was behind bars, he was smiling,” he says. “I can’t forget that smile on his face. It was a smile of courage and the ability to fight his way out of prison. But I was also shaken. I saw my son in his face.”
Between 2014 and 2019, the case was repeatedly reassigned to new judges.
Eventually, Hafeez’s trial was held in December 2019 inside a high-security prison in Multan. He was convicted under Sections 295-A, 295-B and 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code and sentenced to death by a sessions court. Jamal alleged that during the trial, instead of presenting concrete evidence against Hafeez, the prosecution used threats and innuendo, accusing him of being “against Islam”. According to human rights observers, this is not an uncommon occurrence in Pakistan: observers allege that lower courts frequently fail to follow basic evidentiary standards in blasphemy cases. In addition, threats from outside the court weigh heavily against the accused: Saif-ul-Malook, Hafeez’s current counsel, recently stated in an interview that defendants face fears of retaliation and mob violence.
Acquittals in blasphemy cases usually come from the higher courts instead of the trial courts. According to a 2015 report by the International Commission of Jurists, the appellate acquittal rate for blasphemy cases is around 80 percent, significantly higher than the acquittal rate of 69 percent for other criminal cases in Punjab before appellate courts. Recently, in 2025, Zafar Bhatti, a pastor accused of blasphemy in 2012, was acquitted by the Lahore High Court after being held in prison for 13 years. Justice in the appellate courts often takes years.
After Hafeez’s conviction in 2019, his appeal was filed in 2020. It is still pending.
Another point to underscore is that in a way the initial trial has also still not been concluded. In Pakistan, any case involving capital punishment has two steps. After a trial court awards the death sentence, the case, now referred to as the Capital Punishment Reference, is sent to the High Court, where an independent bench must confirm it after reviewing all the evidence. It gives the accused additional protection where the prosecution’s case has to withstand this double scrutiny. It underscores that the burden of proof is on the prosecution and hence the evidence presented should prove that the crime was committed beyond a reasonable doubt. His hearing for the appeal and the Capital Punishment Reference is still pending. According to Malook, appeals for cases decided in 2021 are being heard in the Lahore High Court but Junaid Hafeez’s case, which was decided in 2019, keeps being rescheduled.
Meanwhile, his lawyer and family have reported sporadic episodes of mental breakdown. His prison conditions are in violation of Pakistan’s own prison rules, which require that a solitary cell have a yard attached, where the occupant gets fresh air. The Penal Code caps solitary confinement, as punishment for a crime, at three months. The UN Committee against Torture, which reviews whether states are meeting their obligations under the Convention against Torture, mentioned Junaid Hafeez specifically when it noted that blasphemy prisoners are isolated for periods far exceeding the fourteen consecutive days the law permits. It also told Pakistan that where protection is genuinely needed, such prisoners must be transferred to another prison or section instead of isolating them, and to ensure that security measures themselves do not amount to ill-treatment.
Such bleak existence would break even the strongest of us, but incredibly, Hafeez still remains hopeful. I first joined other civil society organisers to advocate for Hafeez’s rights in 2019. Little has changed for him in the past seven years.
In my conversations with Hafeez’s lawyers and family, I have learned that his demands are fundamental. He wants his right to a free and fair trial and a chance to prove his innocence as enshrined in the Constitution of Pakistan. He wants the justice system to follow due process, as the Constitution and human decency require.
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