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Ayaz Nizami is the Vice President of the Atheist & Agnostic Alliance Pakistan. He is a blogger, who is now a political prisoner in Pakistan, of all places. He was arrest on March 24, 2017 based on the imaginary crime of ‘blasphemy.’

Those who want to enforce their faith over others to prevent criticism or ridicule will jail the dissenters. The dissenters do not have this ability. That form of asymmetry creates a nightmare for human rights activists, whether word or deed, and a dream tactic on the part of authoritarians to arrest political activists, such as Nizami.

He, at present, is facing the death penalty. This becomes a common phenomena with the people inside of theocratic regimes subject to the whims of the powerful and the privileged.

The charge is the translation of materials in English to Urdu. The material was to be published. He founded a website, realisticapproach.org,which amounts to an irreligious Urdu website.

Then he served as the Vice President of the AAAP. I was days from interviewing him for Conatus News, and then heard of the news of his arrest. He was arrested around the time of a cracking down on social media content seen as blasphemous.

These crackdowns were by the Pakistani government. Then there was a hashtag, #hangayaznizami, after the arrest of Nizami. Then his material and social media account were shut down because of the purportedly controversial content (freedom of expression denied).