Death held back

For now, at least, the moratorium on capital punishment put in place in 2008 by the previous PPP government is to stay. A final decision on the matter will be taken in a few weeks’ time, when the prime minister and the president of the country meet on the issue. The continuation of the moratorium for now, is obviously good news. Pakistan remains among the few countries in the world which retain the death penalty for a wide range of crimes. Apart from human rights issues, already raised by Amnesty International and other bodies, the situation is an especially hazardous one given the many flaws inherent in our police investigation system and working at the lower judicial levels. Because of these factors, we do not know how many of the 8,000 convicts currently on death row underwent a fair trial.

There are other considerations too. The European Union has threatened to deny access to its lucrative markets if the death penalty is restored. Pakistan has been seeking access to these markets for a long time, and obviously it needs to expand exports if it is to gain economic stability. These are not matters that can be ignored. Other international bodies have also asked Pakistan not to resume hangings at its jails. What is also clear is that the matter needs to be discussed in depth; the five-year moratorium has paved the way towards this. The next step would be to move forward by discussing the death penalty, its dangers and also the philosophy on which any judicial system should be based, with the essential idea of reform and not mere retribution underlying it. This is something to discuss at a wider level so that the matter can enter public discourse and generate thinking on what precisely capital punishment achieves and if it in any way acts to bring down the rate of crime. This, after all, should be the goal in any country and to achieve this, examples from other parts of the world need to be looked at in depth so that a realistic picture can emerge.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 5^th, 2013.

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