Innocent journalist who was sentenced to death free at last!

It is with great relief that the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) learned on Monday of the release of the Afghan journalist Parvez Kambakhsh. The human rights organisation regretted however that the unjust conviction of the critical journalist was not reversed. Instead of acknowledging his innocence and compensating him for the illegal imprisonment Parvez was after massive international pressure taken from the central prison in Kabul to a secret place and from there just flown abroad. Since his arrest on 27th October 2007 the GfbV had worked intensively for his release.

The initiative of the GfbV moved the Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, many German politicians and governments throughout the world to speak up for his release. More than 100,000 Europeans had signed petitions for his release. In Germany it was above all the Hamburger Stiftung für Verfolgte (The Hamburg Foundation for Persecuted Persons) which worked together with the GfbV, granting him one of their annual scholarships.

"The release of the young journalist is like the withdrawal of citizenship from a troublesome critic", said the GfbV Afghanistan expert Tillmann Schmalzried. The Parvez case has like no other shown up the deficits of the Afghan system of prosecution and justice. When he was finally sentenced to death on 22nd January 2008 the matter became a bone of contention between the international community and the Afghan government. Pressure from abroad led the court of appeal to commute the death sentence into a 20-year prison sentence.

The arrest and sentence of Parvez were intended to hit above all his brother Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, a renowned journalist and feared critic of the warlords and their arbitrary rule. Parvez was sentenced to death in a court case which infringed Afghan and international law "for attacking and insulting the Holy Prophet and for deliberately falsifying verses of the Koran". He was accused of distributing among students at the Balkh University a text available on the internet which insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Parvez had always denied this and said that his signature had been forged. Witnesses for the defence put forward by his lawyer were not heard by the court. Directly after his arrest by the security service he was tortured, as has been confirmed by several reliable witnesses. However the authorities and the court ignored all charges of torture.