Explained: Pakistan's emotive blasphemy laws

Bishop John Joseph, 65, one of Pakistan’s most prominent human rights activists, had been campaigning for decades to reform the country’s strict blasphemy laws.
On the morning of May 6, 1998, he led a procession to the steps of the court in the central Pakistani town of Sahiwal, where a young man, Ayub Masih, had been convicted and sentenced to death for blasphemy days earlier.
Masih, an illiterate man, had been accused of quoting from Salman Rushdie’s controversial book The Satanic Verses in an argument with a Muslim man. In a controversial trial, a judge found him guilty of having insulted Islam’s prophet and sentenced him to the mandatory death penalty.
Joseph led prayers for Masih and walked protesters to the doors of the court. He then pulled out a pistol and shot himself in the head.
The bishop’s suicide was a striking protest against Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws, initially a holdover from British colonial rule that were strengthened in independent Pakistan due to pressure from the religious right wing.
In recent years, record numbers of cases are being filed under the law, which can carry a death sentence, inside or outside the courtroom. Last month, several cases were filed against members of the country’s Shia Muslim minority, who form roughly 20 percent of the country’s 207 million population.
Currently, there are about 80 convicts on death row or serving life imprisonment terms in Pakistan for committing “blasphemy”, according to (PDF) the US Commission for International Religious Freedom.