Registered blasphemy cases in Pakistan have plunged by roughly two-thirds since January, Reuters reported on August 6, 2026, after the army banned the hardline party that long led deadly anti-blasphemy riots.
The drop tests whether a state that long nurtured religious hardliners can now protect the minorities its own blasphemy law helped endanger.
The count comes from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent rights body that logged just 13 registered blasphemy cases by early August 2026.
The country averaged more than seven blasphemy riots a year from 2021 to 2024.
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, a group that tracks political violence, recorded just one such riot in the 12 months ending August 2026.
Four government and security sources told Reuters that army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir personally oversaw the crackdown on hardline religious groups.
Pakistan banned the largest of those groups, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, in late 2025, jailing its leaders, sealing its mosques, and freezing its bank accounts.
The party formed in 2015 around support for a police guard who had killed a governor in 2011 for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.
Ihsan Ghani, Pakistan's counterterrorism chief at the time of the party's deadly 2017 riots, told Reuters: "You cannot switch on, switch off something of this scale which you took years to nurture as a state policy."
Rights groups warn that quieter streets do not fix the law itself.
A June 2025 report from Human Rights Watch found that accusers exploit the blasphemy law for blackmail, extortion, and land grabs, not only religious anger.
Organized rings entrap victims through social media and then demand money, and one network snared more than 450 people with fabricated accusations, the report found.
The law's harshest clause, Section 295-C, sets death as the mandatory sentence for insulting the Prophet Muhammad, though Pakistan has never executed anyone under it.
About 90 people have died in blasphemy-linked lynchings in Pakistan since 1990, Reuters found.
Even with new cases falling, people already inside the system stay trapped.
Human Rights Watch urged Pakistan in February 2026 to quash the conviction of Junaid Hafeez, a former university lecturer sentenced to death in December 2019 over Facebook posts.
Hafeez has sat in solitary confinement since June 2014, isolation the group calls cruel treatment that may amount to torture.
Defending him proved deadly: gunmen shot his lawyer, Rashid Rehman, dead in his Multan office in May 2014 after open threats.
Hundreds of people have faced blasphemy charges in Pakistan over the past three decades, and dozens now serve life sentences, the group says.
The heaviest burden still falls on religious minorities.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom urged Washington in its 2026 annual report to keep Pakistan on its list of the world's worst violators of religious freedom.
The commission counted four death sentences in January 2025 alone for allegedly blasphemous social media posts.
Pakistan's constitution has classed Ahmadis, a community that considers itself Muslim, as non-Muslims since 1974, and the penal code bars them from calling their worship places mosques.
Amnesty International pressed Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz in a May 2026 open letter to protect Ahmadis, citing a spike in violence around religious holidays.
One killing in April 2025 shows what the crackdown aims to stop.
A mob beat Laeeq Cheema, a member of the Ahmadi community, to death near the community's worship place in Karachi on April 18, 2025, the Associated Press reported.
Supporters of the party later banned in the crackdown had rallied outside that site every Friday, and community spokesman Amir Mahmood said police took no action in earlier weeks.
Analysts warned Reuters that the banned party could surge back, and the commission wants the blasphemy law repealed, not left on the books.
For prisoners like Hafeez, now in his 13th year behind bars, the fall in new cases has changed nothing yet.
