Courting Justice

How one organization fights court battles for those overwhelmed by the legal system

Justice is not always blind and not everyone is equal before the law in Pakistan. And poorer prisoners and convicts often bear the brunt of this injustice. They are accused of crimes they did not commit and face greater persecution in and outside jails.



It was the summer of 2001. Sohail Yafat, a student of intermediate level at Cathedral Higher Secondary School in Lahore Cantt, was trudging back home from his evening job at an IT school in Gulberg, where he worked to fund his education. He arrived home to find the police waiting for him. “They had implicated me in a murder case... a murder that had taken place in Sahiwal,” he says. His family, poverty-stricken, could not afford to hire an expensive legal counsel or appeal in superior courts. “It took 10 years to prove my innocence,” he says. The case was suspended, not dismissed, by the Lahore High Court. “It’s been 15 years and though I’m free, the sword still hangs over my head.”

The decade spent in prison was traumatic for Yafat. Those who have served time or are currently in prison would tell you they wouldn’t wish it on their worst enemy, he says. To cope with the trauma, Yafat, who’s had a Catholic upbringing, became a counsellor and a teacher of Christianity at the prison he was incarcerated in. “I would talk to all inmates about interfaith peace and harmony, and human dignity,” he says, adding that he told prisoners, even those on death row, to know that this was not the end of the world. “During my time in prison and later outside of it, I’ve seen countless convicts reform and earn an honest living,” he says. Several of his fellow inmates, who were later released, set up fruit carts or started dyeing fabrics for a living.

But the disparaging treatment meted out to ex-cons is sometimes worse than the life they leave behind in prison. “No one was willing to hire me when I was released. Inocent, yet I remained a murder accused with limited education and a gap of 10 years on my resume,” says Yafat. But fortunately for Yafat and others like him, some organisations, such as the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), have come through to help those who find themselves on the wrong side of law. They offer free legal services to those who cannot afford it and secure their right to a fair trial.

Innocent until proven guilty

A few years ago, JPP, a Lahore-based non-profit human rights law firm established in December 2009, organised a workshop on Criminal Law where Yafat spoke about his experience as an ex-inmate. That was when advocate Sarah Belal asked him to join her organisation. She offered him a platform to work with the people he had left in body, but never in spirit.



Now a senior investigator at JPP, Yafat says, “The best part of my job is that I get to return to the prison and exhort the inmates there. I offer them words of comfort and tell them that they are not alone. We (JPP) stand by them.” He believes God has been kind to him as there are thousands of prisoners still languishing in dark cellars across the country, fighting a justice system that appears to have abandoned them.

To highlight the issue, Reprieve, a UK-based legal action group, and JPP conducted a study based on a sample of 30 prisoner profiles across the country and discovered that every three of the 30 prisoners they interviewed had been sentenced to death when they were juveniles. The March 2015 report titled ‘Juveniles on Pakistan’s Death Row’, states: “Should this figure hold true for prisoners across the country, there could be more than 800 child offenders among the 8,261 prisoners currently sentenced to death.” Moreover, there is an ominous ticker on the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s website that reads, “139 convicts have been executed since December 2014,” though the actual figure is now higher.

While conducting a detailed study on Pakistan’s death row prisoners in 2013, JPP came across Shafqat Hussain. He is shy and smiles a lot, Belal reveals. Convicted of murder when he was reportedly a teenager, Belal discovered that Hussain has a learning disability, which he hid behind that smile. Hussain’s case, she says, was fraught with complications: His confession was forced through torture, his body still carrying marks of cigarette burns, and the defence had little to prove his juvenility at the time of conviction. JPP took on the case and put its lawyers, investigators and advocacy team behind it. “We highlighted Shafqat’s case in the court of law and in the court of public opinion,” she adds.

A talk on the criminal justice system and death penalty organised by the Justice Project Pakistan at University College Lahore. PHOTOS COURTESY: JPP FACEBOOK PAGE

Hussain was named among the first prisoners to be executed after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif removed the moratorium on death penalty following an attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar. January 14, 2014, was decided as the date for his execution. Since then, Hussain has been to the gallows and back at least three times. On March 18, 2015, dressed in a white uniform, Hussain wrote his last will: “I am innocent. They want to hang me for a crime I have not committed, to save others who have been freed.” Then, he was told that his sentence had been postponed, only to have a black warrant issued again on May 6, which was, once again, put off. On June 1, an anti-terrorism court in Karachi issued another death warrant for Hussain and ordered his execution on June 9. If he is hanged, it will be a big loss for JPP and Reprieve.

The recent shift in public opinion, favouring capital punishment, has a lot to do with how one sees and perceives prisoners. Society thinks prisoners are the scum of the earth, says Yafat. “They cease to be considered human beings as soon as they’re behind bars.”

One law for all

Along with those imprisoned in Pakistan, JPP extends its services to citizens locked up abroad. Saqib Mushtaq, an investigator with JPP, has been working to gather all possible facts and look for channels of advocacy to highlight the issue of Pakistani prisoners on death row in Saudi Arabia for allegedly smuggling drugs into the country.

Representatives of drug barons visit villages, mostly near Faisalabad, Khushab and Sargodha, and target the poor, says Mushtaq. Posing as representatives of employment agencies, they lure people with promises of jobs and a better life in Saudi Arabia. The unsuspecting victims are told they don’t have to pay a commission until they arrive in Saudi Arabia and start work. These agents arrange for passports and visas for them and call them a few days prior to their departure. “Some are forced to ingest capsules filled with drugs, others are given packages to deliver to ‘relatives’,” shares Mushtaq. They almost always depart from the Islamabad Airport, since it has the least amount of security checks and eight out of 10 of these unwitting drug smugglers are caught at the Saudi Arabia airport.



What happens to these prisoners then is a travesty of justice, Mushtaq says. They are assigned translators to ‘plead’ their case. Most of these translators are from Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Bangladesh and India. Mushtaq says the JPP has been working on getting the government to enter into an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia, similar to the one that exists between Nepal and India.

The other Guantanamo

Abandoned by their own government, some 43 Pakistanis imprisoned in Bagram, Afghanistan, reached out to Sultana Noor, an investigator with Reprieve, through the International Committee of the Red Cross a few years ago. JPP went to court over this in 2010, demanding that these prisoners be brought back to Pakistan.

“Most of the Pakistani prisoners were Pukhtun farmers and businessmen who had crossed the border for work... Some were going about their daily business when they were picked up without warrants or charge sheets or even a chance to say goodbye to their families,” says Waqas Aziz, a case investigator involved with JPP’s efforts to repatriate prisoners. US authorities at Bagram were not legally required to explain why they detain prisoners for years without charge. It was only after several months of incarceration that they were allowed to call back home, and it took years before they could finally return.

Several Pakistani prisoners in Bagram have a similar story to tell. Fourteen-year-old Hamidullah was running an errand for his father, bringing the family’s belongings from their house in Ladha, South Waziristan, prior to a military operation, when he was picked up and whisked off to the ‘other Gitmo’. Six months later, when he called to tell his father that the detainee review board had cleared him of all charges, he couldn’t stand up because of the shackles on his legs. But it would be another 10 years before he would be allowed to enter the country and another several months of incarceration in a Pakistan jail before he could meet his father.

Cases such as Hamidullah’s have been in court for two years and in January 2012 the Lahore High Court directed the government to negotiate the release of all prisoners. Belal, who was representing the prisoners, says the motivation to represent Pakistanis illegally detained by US forces in Bagram Prison was the same as it is for most of their cases. “We want to stand up for the marginalised and the vulnerable. Having fallen through the cracks of indefinite detention, these Pakistanis had been completely abandoned by their country and left to the whims of US forces,” she says. “Our petition in the Lahore High Court was to compel our own government to realise its duty towards these citizens and their fundamental rights.”

The prisoners were brought back in groups in 2012, “but they are being held in various prisons across the country without access to legal counsels or their family,” says Zainab Mehboob, a lawyer at JPP. The JPP, therefore, went to the courts again, seeking details of the number of prisoners being brought back and requesting that they be given access to their families. Aziz reveals that the first batch of prisoners who returned were detained for about a month before they were set free, but the rest of the prisoners were detained for 90 days. “The ones we know of have been repatriated, but we have reason to believe that there might be others and we’re pushing the government to give us an exact number of Pakistanis detained there,” says Mehboob.

The notorious facility was eventually shut down in December last year. For Aziz and Mehboob, the closing of Bagram Prison marked a lifetime achievement. “We had been working for these prisoners. We had seen the pain and trauma their parents and loved ones go through. And when we finally met them, it was like four years of hard work coming to fruition,” says Aziz. According to Belal, it was one of the happiest moments for her and her entire team when they took the families of six detainees to Peshawar. “It was a great sense of fulfillment... The joy on their faces is what drives us and keeps us going.”

Belal was in law school when she attended a talk by Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith. At the talk, a former death row inmate spoke of his experience and “that changed me,” she recalls. At the end of his lecture, Smith said, “You are some of the best legal minds of the future... It is your responsibility to raise your voices for the vulnerable and the marginalised.” Sarah knew that she had found her calling: “I knew then that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

Other NGOs providing legal aid to the marginalised

Legal Aid Women Trust

Provides legal support to women, especially those who are imprisoned.

Center for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement

Offers legal support to Christian victims of religious intolerance and blasphemy laws.

AGHS Legal Aid Cell

Focuses on rights of women, children and minorities in Pakistan.

Pakistan Lawyers Foundation

Not-for-profit organisation that provides legal services to those who cannot afford it.

Sanjog

Provides legal aid to children in jails and also works against child trafficking.

Sarah Eleazar is a senior subeditor on the Lahore city desk of The Express Tribune. She tweets @saraheleazar 

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, June 7^th, 2015.