A petition has been launched to save a young Christian living in Pakistan who was falsely accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death. Shahzad Masih was arrested in July of 2017 when he was just 16 years old after a Muslim coworker reported him for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad, which he was found not guilty of. Masih was nevertheless sentenced to execution by hanging in November 2022 and has sat in prison for over 6 years.

The organizer of the petition, ACLJ, states that they have “mobilized our legal team on the ground in Pakistan to represent him and appeal his case,” and adds that they will “take this case all the way to Pakistan’s Supreme Court.” The petition has garnered over 551,000 out of the requested 1,000,000 signatures as of Monday.

In October of 2022, the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) reported that they had presented this case to Members of the European Union Parliament before Masih was convicted. The organization said that their “affiliate in Pakistan has been working to defend him in court. In addition, our international legal teams have been working to highlight his case across the globe, including recently at the UN Human Rights Council and now at the European Union.”

The ECLJ website explains that a Muslim coworker, Ishtiaq Ahmad Jalali, engaged Masih in a conversation about Christian prophets and Muslim prophets. During the conversation, Masih told Jalali that his father’s friend had made derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad which made Jalili vocally upset. Masih was later confronted by a Muslim sectarian group outside of the hospital where he worked. He told them what happened, however the group decided to take the then 16-year-old to an Islamic religious school and hand him over to the police who filed a blasphemy case against him.

The police investigation did not uncover blasphemy from Masih’s conversation. Despite this, prosecutors still brought the case to trial. A witness had stated that “Jalali began the religious conversation” and that Masih only said that “his father has a friend named Ali, who uses derogatory remarks in the respect of Holy Prophet.” An investigating officer also testified in court that he “did not declare Shahzad Masih guilty” and noted that Jalili had started the religious conversation.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reports that Masih was convicted on November 22, 2022 and sentenced to death.