Hanging hiatus

Nobody was executed in Pakistan in 2013, a fact welcomed by Amnesty International (AI) in its report “Death sentences and executions in 2013.” Whilst that is much to be welcomed, the other side of the coin is that 226 people were sentenced to death last year and there are now around 8,526 prisoners on death row at the end of last year. The judiciary is as keen on hanging as it ever was, and for a time, once the five-year moratorium on hanging had lapsed, it looked as if the Nawaz Sharif government was going to start emptying the death cells. Reports of pressure, particularly from EU countries in all likelihood, gave a pause for thought, but Pakistan has the highest number of death sentences awarded out of all the countries listed in the report.

AI notes that Pakistan is just one of three countries that carried out executions in 2012 but none in 2013, and AI sees this as a positive step, but there was a caveat. Pakistan is one of the few countries to retain the death penalty for non-lethal crimes, and if convicted of blasphemy or a drug-crime, the death sentence may be passed. Within the last week, a Christian man has been sentenced to death for blasphemy; and Aasia Bibi continues to languish in jail for committing an alleged blasphemy that is said to have occurred during a squabble between women in a field. It is cases such as these, which draw the attention of the world to our judicial system and the iniquity of some of our legislation. There are cases of innocent people being executed — in Japan, a man was released from death row after more than 40 years on March 27 as DNA evidence has shown him not to have committed the murders he was accused of. He was allegedly tortured by the police and falsely admitted the crime. One wonders how many in Pakistan were similarly tortured by police into a confession that sees them awaiting a judicial killing. Let there be no hangings in 2014 and the hanging hiatus be converted into abolition.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 29^th, 2014.

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