Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh was a journalism student at Balkh University in Mazar el Sharif. He was also a reporter for a newspaper called New World (Jahan-e-Naw). On Oct. 27, 2007, he was arrested on a charge of "blasphemy and distribution of texts defamatory of Islam.”
His crime: downloading and distributing an article off the Internet by an Iranian questioning tenets of Sharia law regarding women's rights (or the lack thereof), such as why men may marry four wives but women may marry only one husband. He didn't write the article. He didn't editorialize about it. He downloaded it and distributed it.
In a one-day trial on Jan. 22, 2008, he was tried in secret, without a defense lawyer, and sentenced to death. He got a lawyer and appealed. A Kabul court "reduced" the sentence to 20 years in prison last October. He appealed to the Afghan Supreme Court. Turns out that court one month ago upheld the 20-year sentence and didn't bother telling his lawyer, Mohamad Afzal Nuristani.
“I went to the supreme court to hand in the defense arguments," Nuristani told Reporters Without Borders. "There, I was told that the court confirmed the 20-year sentence a month ago and that the case has been already passed back to the prosecutor. How can they reach such a decision without even waiting to hear what the defence has to say?”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has it in his power to pardon Kambakhsh. But Karzai is impotence incarnate, a president in name only. He may not be corrupt. His brothers, his associates, his cabinet, his government oozes corruption. He can't afford magnanimity in the face of mullahs. So Kambakhsh is going to spend 20 years in prison. For daring to distribute an article questioning the inequality of the sexes in Islamic law.
This is the Afghanistan western soldiers and Afghans are dying for.
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