Afghani Christian Converts and Sharia Law

An ongoing ambiguity. The New York Times reports. Excerpts:

...Afghanistan’s Constitution, established in 2004, guarantees that people are “free to exercise their faith.” But it also leaves it open for the courts to rely on Shariah, or Islamic law, on issues like conversion. Under some interpretations of Shariah, leaving Islam is considered apostasy, an offense punishable by hanging.

Mr. Mussa, 46, is staring at the prospect of a death sentence...

Diplomats and Afghan officials, meanwhile, have tried to keep it out of the spotlight, fearing that publicity, particularly from the local news media, could set off an outcry from hard-line conservatives, endangering him and other Afghan Christians.

...after months of intermittent measures by diplomats to free him, Christian advocates and members of Congress are growing frustrated, not least with the larger issue of underwriting an Afghan government that has not ensured religious freedom.

“We cannot justify taxpayer dollars going to a government that allows the same restrictions on basic human rights that existed under the Taliban,” two Republican members of Congress, Representatives Trent Franks of Arizona, co-chairman of the International Religious Freedom Caucus, and Doug Lamborn of Colorado, wrote in a letter last fall to Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, urging stronger action...

“Based on Shariah law, whoever converts from Islam should be sentenced to death,” said the prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But based on international agreements that Afghanistan has accepted and agreed with, Sayed Mussa has a chance to be released.”

The Afghan government has not executed anyone for religious crimes since the Taliban’s fall, though at least one person has been sentenced to death: Parvez Kambakhsh, a journalism student, who in 2008 was condemned for blasphemy for distributing material found on the Internet questioning women’s rights under Islam. A court later commuted the sentence to 20 years before President Hamid Karzai pardoned him.

Another man, Shoaib Assadullah Musawi, has been jailed in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif since November after being accused of giving the New Testament to a friend, who then turned him in.

Afghan and American legal experts say such cases are rare. But in the handful that have emerged publicly, it has taken Western intervention to secure a release, leaving the central ambiguities in the Constitution unresolved...

For more on such issues, see The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam, Freedom to Believe: challenging Islam's apostasy law, or (judging by the title) Shari'a in the Constitutions of Afghanistan, Iran And Egypt: Implications for Private Law.