To the benefit of nobody

Lifting of moratorium after APS attack seems little more than a knee-jerk reaction with a strong element of populism

Judicial killing has taken many forms down the ages, none of them pretty and all of them grotesque to a greater or lesser degree. The Indonesian government executed eight drug traffickers in the last week. They were tied to crosses before being shot, were reported to have refused to be blindfolded and sang “We shall overcome” together before the firing squads did their work. Pakistan recently hanged its hundredth man since the moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in the wake of the massacre at the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar last December. The moratorium was initially only lifted for those convicted in terrorism cases but later it was lifted for all cases in which the death penalty had been awarded.



There are thousands on death row in the country and Pakistan, complete with its deeply flawed judicial system, has 27 offences which carry the option of the death penalty. There is ample evidence, anecdotal and empirical, that the wider population supports the death penalty, and there are elements of that population which even support the public execution of criminals by methods which much of the rest of the world regards as barbaric.

Looking at the list of those executed thus far there are few who have been hanged for acts of terrorism, and most of those hanged had committed acts of domestic violence, often killing multiple people. Their convictions are for the most part long-standing and they had exhausted all roads of appeal. There have been a handful of ‘high-profile’ executions but thus far there is not a lot of evidence that the lifting of the moratorium has done much to deter terrorism. Indeed, the converse effect may be in play — those who commit terrorist acts often do so with the desire for ‘martyrdom’ at the forefront of their minds so it is questionable whether the death penalty has played the role of an effective deterrent in such cases.

The Pakistan legal system, as noted above, determines 27 offences that are punishable by death. These go far beyond what most of the rest of the world regards as the threshold for ‘most serious crimes’ as described in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In Pakistan, a person may be sentenced to death for sabotage of the railway system, gang-rape, drug smuggling, trading arms — the list goes on. What is really problematic is that the determination of guilt in respect of any or all of these offences is flawed from top to bottom, and given that many of those recently hanged were convicted at a time when police procedures were even more lax, primitive and corrupt than they are today; the chances of innocent men having had their necks stretched is disturbingly high.

A few cases where men are condemned to die have attracted international attention, that of Shafqat Hussain who is due to hang on May 6 being one of them. His case is an example of the inherent flaws in the system — judicial, investigative and custodial. The dispute surrounding Shafqat Hussain is less about his guilt or innocence and more about his age at the time of his conviction and whether he was a juvenile at that point, thus making the death sentence inappropriate. As of today, it appears he will hang, as will unknown numbers of others, some of whom will not have been truly guilty of a capital offence — and that is wrong.

The lifting of the moratorium after the APS atrocity today looks like little more than a knee-jerk reaction with a strong element of populism deeply embedded. The government was quickly able to take and implement a decision that gave the impression of ‘doing something’ in response to the APS killings. In reality, the hanging of a succession of men who for the most part have committed what may be classed as ‘crimes of passion’, does absolutely nothing beyond satisfy a public that is under the illusion that it does. And that is also wrong.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th,  2015.

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