No headway: Legislation to abolish death penalty unlikely

Govt finds no takers for converting capital punishment to life term.

ISLAMABAD:

It appears that the government has dropped plans of introducing new legislation which effectively converts the death penalty into life imprisonment.

Earlier there were indications that the government will table a bill in Parliament seeking to ban the death penalty altogether but after failing to forge consensus over the issue, it backtracked finding the matter “sensitive”.

“We don’t have any plans to introduce legislation to abolish the death punishment,” Law and Justice Secretary Yasmin Abbasi told The Express Tribune. At the moment, she explained, “Even, I cannot say whether such a law will be introduced in the near future or not.”

Officials of the law ministry, who were tasked to prepare recommendations on the issue, stated that the Presidency started considering the matter when it was informed about a huge backlog of around 8,000 inmates currently on death row in several jails across the country.

President Asif Ali Zardari had directed the quarters concerned – the ministries of interior and law, and provincial home departments – to prepare a comprehensive report advising the move, officials from the law ministry told The Express Tribune on Tuesday.

The directions came from the Presidency when it received multiple mercy petitions of condemned prisoners last year — a total of over 522 mercy petitions were received, officials said. Some 462 mercy petitions were received from Punjab, 28 from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 20 from Sindh and 12 from Balochistan.



When contacted, President’s spokesperson Farhatullah Babar said, “There is no proposal to abolish the death punishment altogether. However, during the past four years (sans one case involving an army man) not a single convicted person has been sent to the gallows. No death sentence has been commuted.”

The government has been facing tough resistance over such matters whenever it intended to amend laws including legislation on blasphemy laws or the conversion of death penalty into life imprisonment. Last year, Islamabad was close to signing an extradition treaty with the United Kingdom but it could not finalise it due to the absence of such laws.

Political parties, while giving their comments on the issue, said that they will not support any such law.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz MNA Ahsan Iqbal said that his party strongly opposed such legislation. “My party supports capital punishment as deterrence for crime control,” he asserted.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl leader Abdul Ghafoor Haideri was of the view that these laws were already in place and needed no changes. “JUI-F does not see any lacuna in the existing laws,” he explained.

Awami National Party Senator Zahid Khan stated that such laws were better for a “civilised society” no matter which country it was. “But in view of the existing situation Pakistan is facing, it’s next to impossible to amend the law,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 9^th, 2013.