When a Christian girl is taken from her home in Pakistan, the family’s first instinct is to search the neighbourhood and to plead with anyone who might know where she is. I understand that instinct, but as a Senior Advocate High Court I must tell you plainly: the first hours decide everything, and those hours must be spent with the police and with a lawyer.
The pattern is familiar to every Christian lawyer in Pakistan. A girl, often a minor, disappears. Within a day or two a paper appears claiming that she has converted and married of her own free will. When the family reaches the court, they are told she is an adult who chose her new faith freely. The girl herself, standing beside her abductor, says what she has been told to say. If the family has no documents and no lawyer, the case is over before it has begun.
What to do in the first hours
- Go to the police station at once and insist that an FIR is registered for abduction. Note the time you arrived and the name of the officer.
- Gather her birth certificate, her school certificate, her church baptism record and her national registration documents. These are the proof of her age.
- Collect recent photographs of the girl and, if possible, of the persons last seen with her.
- Call a lawyer. Christian Lawyers Alliance Pakistan (CLAP) will file a habeas corpus or recovery petition in the High Court so that the girl is produced before a judge, and will ask for age determination by a medical board and by the school record.
- Ask the court for a protection order so that the girl can be placed in a shelter, away from the abductor, while her true wishes are heard.
After the recovery
Recovery is not the end. A girl who returns home is frightened, often ashamed, and sometimes threatened again. The family needs a lawyer to support the prosecution, and the girl needs a pastor, a doctor and a counsellor. The Alliance stays with the family through this stage, because a case abandoned after recovery invites the same thing to happen to another girl.
The Constitution of Pakistan guarantees every citizen the freedom to profess her own religion. A conversion made under threat, by a child, is not the exercise of that freedom; it is its denial. That is why CLAP supported the call for a legal minimum age of marriage across the country, and why we ask the courts to examine age before they examine consent.
I say to every pastor: know your young people’s documents before the day they are needed. And I say to every family: do not wait for daylight. Register the FIR, gather her school certificate, and call us at clap.com.pk. Psalm 82:3 tells us to defend the weak and the fatherless. We take that command into court.
— Founding Patron in Chief Advocate Soba Sorya, Senior Advocate High Court, Christian Lawyers Alliance Pakistan (CLAP)
