1er Congrès mondial contre la peine de mort
Strasbourg - 21, 22, 23 juin 2001

The plight of condemned prisoners and vulnerability of the innocent to
torture and capital punishment, in the existing scenario in Pakistan
Presented by
Dr. Mubarak Jamal Mehdi,
Medical Director, LRCT, Pakistan

Death penalty is the premeditated killing of a human being by the state. In the past several years many thousands of prisoners have been executed in score of countries all over the world. Men, women and even children have been hanged, shot dead, electrocuted, gassed, poisoned, beheaded or stoned to death in fulfillment of judicial orders.
Many of the executed were convicted of brutal crimes. Others died for non-violent offences, including economic corruption and adultery. Many went to their deaths for purely political reasons or after blatantly unfair trials. Some were prisoners of conscience. No body knows the exact number of innocent victims of execution. Cruel, arbitrary and irrevocable, the death penalty is imposed disproportionately on the poor and the powerless. It is a violation of human rights.
As of the latest statistics released by the HRCP, more than 4500 of our fellow citizens are confined to and languish in despondency in the death cells in the prisons of Pakistan.
Rapid growth of Pakistan’s death row population can easily be understood. Over the last three years from 1998 to 2000 at least 1916 people were awarded death sentence and 107 were hanged, showing a net increase of 1809 in the death row population or an average increase of about 600 a year. A large number of the condemned prisoners have been rotting in death cell for long years. Appeals of many of them have been pending in the high court for 3 to 5 years and some of them for 8 to 10 years.
Not to mention the inhuman treatment they meet and the parameters much short of the minimum standard rules for prison populations, and apart from the alarmingly high numbers of condemned prisoners, the number of prisoners in each death row cell is also alarming. These cells are actually meant to house one prisoner each, the number hushed in to individual cells is some time up to 12.
Who can imagine what happens to a person who spends year after year in the death cell? His mind is continuously racked by the thought whether he will be reprieved or hanged. In the latter case, how much longer will he be alive. In a sense, such persons die every day of their shadow existence. Why should court formalities be delayed for years on end? If a case pending before a high court or the Supreme Court for 8 to 10 years does not reveal a scandalous state of affairs, what else will? This may well be one of the factors that have grievously eroded public confidence in the system of justice.
Death penalty in Pakistan is most commonly and regularly imposed for deliberate murder. Murder in the course of gang robbery, waging war against the state and mutiny are also included. Gen. Ziaul Haq, worst of the despots further enlarged this list of offences, by addition of other offences such as kidnapping a child under the age of 10, parading of disrobed women, hijacking and blasphemy.
Blasphemy laws have the maximum potential for misuse against the weak and disadvantaged segments of society such as minorities.
The suggestion for a review of death penalty cases and revival of pardon facilities should not divert us from the central issue – the legitimacy or otherwise of death penalty. Societies that insist on killing some of their wrong doers blithely ignore their own contribution to the creation of circumstances in which weaker, immature or undisciplined human beings indulge in heinous crime.
Justice is not directly or easily within reach of the poor and the disadvantaged. While murder is the commonest of crime resultant to capital punishment, within the feudal setup of the most populous rural areas most the murders are master minded by the feudal lords. They can buy services of professional killers or can incite their own subjects to kill for them. They also purchase the services of professional witnesses either to absolve them selves or to reinforce the case against the accused. Accordingly when it goes to the police and then on to the judicial system, it is difficult to ascertain who the actual murderer is and what were the actual motives behind.
Increasing spate of Extra-judicial killings and deaths in custody is a matter of great concern for which our organization together with the Human rights Commission of Pakistan and the Joint Action Committee for People’s Rights have raised our voice in the form of protest, demonstration and condemnation of the agencies which as tools of the power structures resort to these ruthless measures. The so called “Police encounters” have remained to be the commonest of means to eliminate the unwanted. They usually have a typical stereotype background press note mentioning the story of dead “offenders” who tried to run away from custody or tried to snatch weapons from their legal custodians and opened fire on them and as a result the were killed in the return fire.
Also the growing incidence of invasion upon the dignity of man and privacy of home, application of torture and other cruel and inhuman punishments and violations of basic human rights have become rife, the society has been brutalized and overall air of fear and uncertainty engulfs the masses.
If you have heard of the incidence and prevalence of honour killings and the decadent traditions such as “Karokari” one is constrained to think we live in the land of honourable men. Almost every day and recurrently all the time we have coverage on cases of honor killings in our press. Killer husbands, fathers or brothers invariably escape punishments simply because such acts have a kind of unwritten approval of the theocratic institutions, elders of the tribe or even political authorities.
Public opinion on the abolition of Death Penalty remains sharply divided. While advocates of abolition are gradually gaining some supporters, the attitude of their opponents have further hardened due to a tilt of the state towards the Saudi and the Taliban as desirable models.
In cases of countries like Pakistan where miscarriage of justice, for a variety of reasons, is believed to be on a large scale, the argument for doing away with the death penalty become irrefutable. It is time the whole question of capital punishment was dispassionately examined. Abolition of death penalty will not only solve the problems of the condemned prisoners, offer a sound safeguard against miscarriage of justice resulting in execution, it will be a sterling affirmation of the Pakistani peoples’ belief in the inherent dignity of the human person.