Expediting terror cases: Chief justice calls meeting of ATC judges

LHC seeks reply from centre, Punjab regarding implementation on death sentence.

PESHAWAR/ LAHORE:

Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Nasirul Mulk on Thursday said a meeting of high courts’ judges – working as administrative judges at anti-terrorism courts – will soon to be convened in Islamabad to speed up the trials of all the terrorism cases pending before their respective ATCs.

“All these cases will be dealt with under the relevant law,” the CJP said, while talking to lawyers in Peshawar High Court (PHC) during a condolence reference, arranged in Peshawar to express solidarity with the lawyers who lost their loved ones in Tuesday’s attack.

Meanwhile, Lahore High Court (LHC) judge Justice Mehmood Maqbool Bajwa sought a reply from federal and Punjab governments in a petition, seeking direction to implement death sentence.

The petition argued that it is the incompetence of federal and provincial governments that while courts have been awarding death penalty to hardened criminals and terrorists, they have failed to implement a single death sentence for years.

“At this stage, reportedly about eight thousand convicted prisoners are waiting for the execution of the capital punishment/death sentence in prisons across Pakistan,’ the petition said.



“Therefore, urgency and need of the hour is to set priority by the government to lift the ban immediately and start implementing the judgment of the Honourable Courts of Pakistan,” the petitioner requested.

It must be noted that a larger bench of the Supreme Court is going to take the matter related to determining the fate of over 8,000 death row prisoners across the country in the third week of January 2015.


Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2014.