by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - A judge in Punjab Province, Pakistan has allowed three young Christian sisters to return to their parents after their employers held them captive and tried to forcibly convert them to Islam, Morning Star News reports.
Aged 9, 13, and 16, the three sisters are the daughters of Naveed Masih and his wife Mina Naveed, brick kiln workers in Kasur District, Punjab Province, MSN reports. Desperately poor, the girls had been sent by their parents to do domestic work for a Muslim woman called Haleema Bibi in September 2023. However, Bibi and three other Muslim families held the girls captive and then claimed they had converted to Islam and did not want to return home.
Following the assistance and intervention of the legal advocacy group Christians True Spirit, on August 15 Justice Shakil Ahmed of the Lahore High Court allowed the sisters to retract their forced claims of conversion and return to their parents, MSN reports. Notably, the court gave no order for action to be taken against Bibi or her co-conspirators.
In an April 2024 statement about the situation facing girls from non-Islamic communities in Pakistan, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said; “Christian and Hindu girls remain particularly vulnerable to forced religious conversion, abduction, trafficking, child, early and forced marriage, domestic servitude and sexual violence.”
“The exposure of young women and girls belonging to religious minority communities to such heinous human rights violations and the impunity of such crimes can no longer be tolerated or justified,” the High Commissioner added.
Muslim-majority Pakistan ranks 7 on the Open Doors World Watch List 2024 of the top 50 countries where Christians are persecuted.