Vacation of stay order: Conviction of five death-row inmates challenged in SC

Petitioner requests top court to take notice of the recent ‘illegal’ executions

ISLAMABAD:

A petition was filed in the Supreme Court on Monday, challenging the Lahore High Court order to vacate the stay on the scheduled execution of five prisoners who had been condemned to death by a military court for their involvement in the 2012 army camp attack in Gujrat.

These convicts were scheduled to be hanged on December 22 but the Rawalpindi bench of the LHC had stayed the executions on a petition of Sajida Perveen – mother of one of the convicts, Ehsan Azeem – claiming that the convicts had been denied their right to a fair trial. However, two days later, the same bench vacated the stay, after the government submitted records of the proceedings of the trial and copies of the military court’s judgment.

The petitioner – through her counsel Laiq Khan Swati – on Monday filed an appeal in the Supreme Court, seeking suspension of the December 24 order of the LHC, as well as military court’s verdict, regarding the execution of death sentence.



“The petitioner seeks intervention of the SC for the suspension of illegal and unlawful sentence of Ehsan Azeem… as there is no other adequate and efficacious remedy available except [to] invoke the constitutional jurisdiction of this court,” the petition reads.

The petitioner made the federation of Pakistan, chief of army staff, judge advocate general GHQ, chief of air staff and the Air Headquarters as respondents. He requested the top court to take notice of the “recent illegal executions’ and ‘issue of death warrants”.

“None [of the convicts] was allowed to produce defence witnesses, none was given trial proceedings for filing of appeals, none was provided the judgment of the court of appeals, but only death warrants were issued to execute them which amounts to a cold blood murder,” the petitioner claims.

The petitioner said that her son and other five convicts were kept in secret detention during investigation, adding that there was no concept of secret trial under the law. She said that she had asked the military authorities on August 28 to provide trail proceedings for formulating an appeal but had not heard back from them thus far.

On December 24, 2014, the LHC, Rawalpindi bench, accepted the deputy attorney general’s view that the production of the charge sheet, trial proceedings and the judgment of the court of appeals to the convicts was against public interest and dismissed the petition as being non-maintainable under Article 199(3) of the Constitution.

“This is, however, an altogether erroneous view. The act of military authorities was in utter violation of Articles 2-A, 9, 10, 10-A, 13 & 19-A of the Constitution,” the petitioner contended, adding that the conviction of her son was unlawful. “Therefore, indulgence of this court is necessary under Article 185(3) of the Constitution.”

The six-year moratorium on the death penalty in terrorism cases was revoked by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif after the December 16 terrorist attack on the Army Public School that killed claimed 150 lives.

After the lifting of moratorium, six persons – Mohammad Aqeel, Arshad Mehmood, Ghulam Sarwar, Akhlaque Ahmed, Rasheed Mehmood and Zubair Ahmed – have been executed. They were involved in the 2003 assassination attempt on former military ruler Pervez Musharraf.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 30^th, 2014.