A Judge Handed Her to the Man Accused of Kidnapping Her. She Is Thirteen.
Amber Nadeem walked out of a courtroom in Faisalabad on July 25 with the relatives and lawyers of the man accused of abducting her. Her parents stood in the courtroom and wept. The law had just told them, in effect, that it was finished with their daughter.
She is thirteen years old. On June 12 she left home to walk to a local market in Punjab Province and did not come back. Her father, a daily wage laborer named Nadeem Masih, and her mother, Nadia Nadeem, spent three days begging police to register the report. Three days is a long time. It was long enough, advocates say, for the accused, a Muslim man named Mohsin Liaqat, to produce paperwork: a certificate of her conversion to Islam and a certificate of marriage.
There was a problem with the paperwork. It lists Amber’s date of birth as June 2008. Her parents were married in 2012.
A magistrate saw the problem. On June 27, after Amber disclosed in court that the accused’s family had coached and pressured her into claiming she was an adult, the magistrate ordered a medical examination to determine her age and placed her in a government shelter. That examination has still not been completed. Which brings us to what Judge Rana Sohail did on July 25, and why it matters far beyond one courtroom in Faisalabad.
