Since the underlying issue here is clearly with Pakistan's laws, I tried looking up how effective a democracy Pakistan is, so that its people would be able to push for freedom of speech laws (or overturning the blasphemy laws) if they so wanted.

Hard to find unbiased sources on this, but it seems like while Pakistan has technically had democratic elections for a while, they have been mired with issues until fairly recently. From wikipedia: "The democratic elections held in 2008 were the first to conclude a complete 5-year term in the nations' political history."