Death row

This week we will see hanging of two condemned prisoners, both juveniles at the time their sentence was handed down

This week we will see the hanging of two condemned prisoners, both juveniles at the time their sentence was handed down. Shafqat Hussain was sentenced in 2004 when he was 14 while Muhammad Afzal Qureshi was 17 at the time of his sentencing.

A watchman by profession, Shafqat Hussain was sentenced by an Anti Terrorism Court to death for kidnapping and killing a seven-year-old boy. But there is a question mark over how the confession was extracted. His family told our reporter Rabia Ali that Shafqat confessed to the crime following several days of torture in police detention. This is quite plausible.

Similarly, Muhammad Afzal Qureshi was convicted of murdering a man during a robbery bid in 1998. His mother said that Afzal was lodged at the juvenile jail at the time of the sentence and at the time he was 17. By law he could not have been sentenced as a juvenile, she argues. While the ordinance that gave this relief came after the sentencing, Pakistan is a signatory to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. This should have protected him. Afzal has so far spent 16 years in jail and his record has been clean.

But the president has rejected the clemency appeals of both prisoners among a list of others, despite their plea that the sentence goes against the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance. This ordinance clearly states that a suspect under 18 cannot be awarded the death sentence.  At some stage in the trial, there was a move to resolve the age issue. It seems to have been forgotten.

The move to hang Shafqat and Afzal comes after the government lifted its death penalty moratorium for all capital crimes last week and instructed provincial governments to proceed with the executions that have remained pending for several years now.

Pakistan’s last execution of a child offender took place in 2006 when Mutabar Khan was hanged in Peshawar. A trial court in Swabi had sentenced Khan to death in October 1998 for the murder of five people in April 1996.

During his appeal, Mutaber Khan provided the court with a school-leaving certificate to support his claim that he was 16 at the time of the killings and contended that authorities knew he was a child because they held him in the juvenile wing of the Peshawar Central Prison for two years.

Lawyer Zia Awan told our reporter that such issues arise because a lot of people don’t have birth certificates and there is no registration. But for that matter, bone ossification tests are carried out.

It may be pertinent to point out that since Mutaber Khan’s execution, only five other places in the world are known to have executed people for crimes committed as children: Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the Hamas-ruled Gaza. Do we really want to join this list?

Amnesty International estimates that there are currently over 8,000 people on death row in Pakistan. Legal aid group Justice Project Pakistan, which works to champion the rights of such prisoners, says that it is the largest number of prisoners facing the death penalty in the world.

Section 12 of the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance (JJS0) 2000 clearly states that a suspect under 18 years of age cannot be awarded the capital punishment.  Justice Project Pakistan fears that there will be a significant number of cases where convictions were obtained under duress or a sentence was given to a juvenile.

In research which was conducted in conjunction with the Yale Law School, nearly 2,000 cases of torture in Faisalabad were documented. Interviewees accused police of manufacturing evidence and torturing suspects.

Given this, it seems only those who cannot pay their way through the system end up at death row. A profile of such prisoners may lend credence to this theory. The mother of Shafqat Hussain may not come to see her son before he is sent to the gallows because the family cannot afford to send her to Karachi. You will die if you are poor, say some.

Their families say that they are now waiting for a miracle to happen. While members of civil society are with them, at the end of the day it seems that officialdom and bureaucratic indifference may not be able to save the two. That is a tragedy in itself.

Published in The Express Tribune, March  16^th,  2015.

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