After repeated setbacks for a Pakistani Christian family struggling to get back their 13-year-old daughter who was forcibly married and converted, a federal court on Friday (January 9) ordered police to search for and turn in their daughter and the Muslim who kidnapped her, sources said.
The newly established two-judge bench of the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) ordered police to bring Maria Shahbaz and 30-year-old Sheharyar Ahmad to court by Friday (January 16). Supreme Court prosecutor Rana Abdul Hameed said Ahmad abducted her on July 29, forced her to convert to Islam and married her. Judges Ali Bakar Najafi and Karim Khan Agha granted the petition of Maria’s father, Shahbaz Masih.
“After our petition for the recovery of our child was rejected by the Lahore courts and the Lahore High Court, we decided to challenge those decisions to the FCC,” Hameed told Christian Daily International Morning Star News. “We informed the court that the girl is a minor and was raped under the guise of conversion to Islam and marriage.”
Hameed said Lahore police colluded with the suspects and led the magistrate court to drop the kidnapping charges against the family.
“The girl was forced to record a statement claiming that she had voluntarily converted to Islam and married Ahmad,” he said. “She also falsely stated that she was an adult despite official documentation proving that she was a minor and not of marriageable age under the state’s child marriage law, which prohibits marriage of girls under 16.”
Human rights activist Safdar Chaudhry welcomed the court’s order, saying the Masih family had remained steadfast in their pursuit of justice despite repeated setbacks in Lahore courts.
“We repeatedly petitioned the court arguing that the girl is a minor and the accused should not be allowed to remain in custody, but our petitions were rejected solely on the basis of the child’s statement to the judge,” Chowdhury said. “We are grateful to the FCC judge for recognizing our legal claims and ordering the production of the child in court. We look forward to the court taking note of the violation of the Child Marriage Act and ordering legal action against the defendants.”
Chaudhry, who is also the chairman of the Ra’a-e-Nijyaat Ministry, is supporting the Masih family in their legal battle.
Masih, a driver and father of five, said his neighbor Ahmad abducted his daughter as she left the house to go to a nearby store. Masi filed a first information report (FIR) at Lahore’s Nawab Town police station, but on August 1, police were informed that Maria had recorded a statement before Model Town judicial magistrate Hassan Sarfaraz Cheema on July 31 in which she claimed to have converted to Islam and married Ahmad of her own free will.
Rights groups say such incidents follow a familiar pattern in Pakistan, where abducted girls, some as young as 10, are kidnapped under the cover of Islamic “marriage,” forced to convert to Islam, and raped. Victims are often pressured to record false statements in favor of their kidnappers, but judges routinely ignore documentary evidence of age and return children to their kidnappers as “legal wives.”
Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari on May 29 signed into law a landmark bill aimed at curbing child marriage in the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), setting the minimum age for marriage at 18 for both men and women. The law was enacted despite fierce opposition from Islamist groups, including the country’s highest Islamic body, the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII).
The CII declared that classifying marriage under the age of 18 as rape is not in accordance with Sharia (Islamic law).
A similar bill is pending in the Punjab Assembly from April 25, 2024. In Punjab, the minimum legal age for marriage for girls remains 16 years. Nationally, the Christian Marriage (Amendment) Act 2024 raised the marriageable age for Christians to 18 years. However, if Christian girls convert to Islam, they are treated as Muslims under Sharia and are allowed to marry at a young age.
Pakistan, where more than 96 percent of the population is Muslim, was ranked eighth on Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List as the country in which it is most difficult to be a Christian.
