Rep. Chris Smith leads bipartisan call for Pakistan to help abducted Christian woman

A bipartisan group of 11 members of Congress, led by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., is calling on the Pakistani government to protect the safety of an 18-year-old Christian woman whose family says she was abducted in March and coerced into converting to Islam, after a Pakistani court rejected their petition seeking her return.

“The circumstances surrounding Neha Faqir's disappearance and subsequent conversion raise profoundly troubling questions about her safety and freedom of religion,” Smith said in a statement announcing the letter. The lawmakers cited Pakistan's own constitution, including Article 20's guarantee of religious freedom and Article 25's equal-protection provision, as legal grounds obligating authorities to act.

Smith, co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, and 10 other House members sent a letter Aug. 20 to Pakistan's Federal Minister for Law and Justice, Azam Nazeer Tarar, urging authorities to ensure the woman's physical safety, give her confidential access to independent legal counsel and private communication with her family, and see that any further court proceedings are free of intimidation. Signers included Democratic Reps. James McGovern of Massachusetts and Brad Sherman of California and Republican Reps. French Hill, Gus Bilirakis, Andy Harris, María Elvira Salazar, Riley Moore, Randy Weber, Michael Cloud, and Blake Moore.

The case was first brought to international attention by the advocacy group Christian Solidarity International (CSI), which Smith's office credited in its statement. According to CSI, Faqir disappeared March 24 after attending a sewing course and was later found at a madrassa in Lahore, where she had converted to Islam.

Faqir appeared before the Lahore High Court on June 9, dressed in Islamic garb and accompanied by Muslim clergy, according to CSI's account of the hearing. Judge Muhammad Tariq Nadeem asked her directly, in open court, where she wanted to go and she replied, “Not with my parents.” The judge then dismissed the family’s petition on that basis without further inquiry into whether she was speaking freely. Her parents, who had asked to speak with her alone for 10 minutes, were denied that request as well. 

A counter-petition filed in April by a lawyer representing supporters of Faqir’s alleged conversion to Islam, claimed she converted voluntarily after researching the matter herself. Faqir’s family disputes that characterization, saying she is illiterate and signed her official conversion documents with a thumbprint rather than a signature. CSI also raised her case at a June 16 hearing on coerced conversion and marriage of religious-minority women at the U.K. Parliament, chaired by Lord Alton.

Smith has repeatedly pressed Pakistan and other governments over the treatment of religious minorities. He authored the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act of 2016, which expanded the State Department's tools for promoting religious freedom abroad, and chaired a Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing on human rights in Pakistan in July 2025. Zeale has previously reported on Smith's advocacy on religious persecution, including his condemnation last week of deadly attacks on Christian communities in Nigeria, where he called on that country's government to “fulfill its most basic responsibility of protecting its citizens.”

Rights groups have documented a broader pattern of abduction and forced conversion targeting Christian and Hindu women and girls in Pakistan for years, cases that advocates say are compounded by inconsistent enforcement of the country’s own constitutional protections. Smith said Faqir's case carries particular weight for religious minorities in Pakistan generally, given how often such groups have faced abduction, forced conversion, and forced marriage.