Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 458

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, thousands of radical Islamists rallied on Friday in Northwestern Pakistan in support of a man who earlier this week walked into a courtroom in the city of Peshawar and gunned down a U.S. citizen on trial for blasphemy. That is how the New York Times started its article on this issue last week. The American, Tahir Naseem, died of his wounds before he could be taken to the hospital while the gunman was taken into custody.

The U.S. State Department said Naseem was standing trial after being lured to Pakistan from his home in Illinois. He was entrapped by the country's controversial blasphemy law, which international rights groups have sought to have repealed. The blasphemy law calls for the death penalty for anyone found guilty of insulting Islam, but, in Pakistan, the mere allegation of blasphemy can cause mobs to riot and vigilantes to kill those who have been accused. Pakistani officials said Naseem was charged with blasphemy after he declared himself to be Islam's prophet. That was the accusation that was laid against him.

At the rally in Peshawar, which was in support of the person who murdered the American citizen, the demonstrators carried signs that praised the murderer for the killing and called for his immediate release from jail. They said he killed Naseem because the government was too slow in prosecuting blasphemy cases.

Last December--8 months ago--I filed a resolution to speak with a unified voice on what I considered to be a nonpartisan issue--a simple statement from this Congress condemning blasphemy laws across the world wherever they exist. We are a nation that stands for the ability of every individual to choose any faith, to change one's faith, or for one to have no faith at all. That is a basic human right. Yet, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 84 countries-- more than one-third of the world's countries--have a blasphemy law on the books, including in Pakistan, where an American citizen was murdered last week under an accusation of blasphemy.

This resolution that I filed 8 months ago with the Foreign Affairs Committee has already moved in the House. The House Foreign Affairs Committee worked through the process of this resolution in March of this year and passed it unanimously. It was sponsored by Democrat Jamie Raskin and had the support of multiple Democrats on the Foreign Affairs Committee. It was overwhelmingly moved while this resolution--a mere eight pages--has sat, unmoved, for 8 months.

The Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, who was appointed by Speaker Pelosi, has said that USCIRF-- that is this organization--has noted countless times that Pakistan's blasphemy law inflames interreligious tensions and too often leads to violence. He urges the State Department to enter into a binding agreement with the Pakistani Government that includes the repeal of blasphemy provisions in the Pakistan Penal Code. I could not agree more.

The Trump administration has spoken out on this, and the House of Representatives has spoken out on this. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a nonpartisan group, has spoken out on this. We in the Senate should also speak out on it, and the time to speak out on it is when we have just had an American citizen murdered overseas because of these laws. It is prime time to move this. This is something that, I believe, should be passed by unanimous consent. How could we oppose the movement of something like this?

Now, I have heard that, possibly, we should slow this whole thing down because resolutions like this should have a fulsome committee process. They should be heard and marked up and read and reread, and 8 months is not enough time to review them. The problem with that is that, last week, a Democratic resolution on elections in Belarus was filed. It was never heard by the Committee on Foreign Relations here in the Senate. Yet it was discharged, placed on the hotline yesterday morning, and cleared last night.

So, for Democratic bills, they don't have to go through the committee process, apparently. They can just move through on their own because the Republicans have not opposed those. The Republicans take the time to read these on their own--to go through the resolutions and make decisions on them. That resolution had a majority of Democratic sponsors, but it also had Republican sponsors.

This resolution is sponsored by Chris Coons and me. We also consider it to be a nonpartisan issue. Something that has sat in the committee for 8 months, waiting, surely can move when something that was filed last week and never heard by the Committee on Foreign Relations could move on the hotline in a single day.

So I bring this resolution because I think we should speak out on this as the House has already spoken out on it, as the State Department has already spoken out on it, as the Trump administration has already spoken out on it, and as USCIRF has already spoken out on it. Res. 458. I further ask the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I want to ask my colleague if there is a difference between this resolution and the resolution on elections in Belarus that was filed last week, was discharged, and then passed on the hotline yesterday.

Obviously there are lots of other issues about elections. There has been a lot of conversation that we have had about elections worldwide and about security of elections, but that particular resolution wasn't held up to go through the Foreign Relations Committee to discuss international elections more. It was discharged, and it was sent to the floor on a hotline, and Republicans and Democrats alike agreed on that resolution and passed it through.

Is there a substantive difference between this resolution and that one?

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Mr. LANKFORD. Reclaiming my time, it is a lesson learned because the challenge of the Foreign Relations Committee is that almost nothing has been able to get through--no Ambassadors, no resolutions. Everything is not good enough. Everything is not big enough. Quite frankly, everything doesn't attack the Trump Presidency and the Trump State Department, which really becomes the issue.

So even things that are nonpartisan, that we all have wide agreement on--that the House of Representatives was 100 percent in agreement on-- can't even get a hearing here, can't even move through. And when an American citizen is killed over a blasphemy law issue, we still can't speak as the Senate. It is unfortunate.

There are things that we disagree on strongly as a body, but protecting the lives of American citizens who are being murdered because of a blasphemy law in Pakistan should not be an area of disagreement for us.

Standing up for religious liberty, speaking out with this one bill-- if there are other issues, do 10 more. It is a basic American freedom. We should do multiple resolutions on freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom for people to live their faith worldwide. That is who we are as Americans. So do a bunch of them. Speak out on them, but don't stop us from speaking at all on issues where we should speak with a common, unified voice.

We can do better, and we should do better, and we will in time. But right now, we are still not speaking with a clear voice on blasphemy and the death of Americans worldwide, and that is something we should all look at and say is one more example of our not getting the job done in the Senate.

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