Pakistan, July 12 -- Every few years, a single conversion case is lifted out of its legal setting and turned into a symbol that has very little to do with the person at its centre. Maria Shahbaz's name now belongs to that list, invoked in European parliamentary debates, folded into a larger story about Christian vulnerability in Muslim-majority states. Yet the case file, read without a pre-written script, tells a different story entirely: one of police professionalism, judicial rigour, and a constitutional framework that protected a minority woman by treating her as an adult citizen with .

Maria Shahbaz, a Christian, was employed at a beauty parlour in Faisalabad, where she developed a relationship with Muhammad Naqash, a Muslim. On 28 A...