An appeals court in Afghanistan today overturned the death sentence of a journalism student at the country’s Balkh University who was convicted this year of blasphemy, sentencing him instead to 20 years in prison, the Associated Press reported.

The student, Sayad Parwez Kambakhsh, who worked for a newspaper in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where he also attended university, was arrested a year ago for distributing material that he had printed from the Internet. A religious court found the material offensive to Islam and sentenced him to death for blasphemy, in a move that the AP said “came to symbolize Afghanistan’s slide toward an ultraconservative view on religious and individual freedoms.”

The initial trial, before a provincial religious court, took a mere five minutes. The appeal, in the Afghan capital, Kabul, took place “before a panel of three judges and involved several hearings over a number of months,” The New York Times reported.

The BBC reported that Mr. Kambakhsh’s family said they would continue to campaign for his release and expected his conviction to be overturned eventually. His brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, criticized the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, for not “using his power to intervene and to pardon his brother,” the BBC reported. Mr. Karzai has said the student is unlikely to be executed. —Aisha Labi