The article: Election pledges a matter of
By Jo Baker
There will be little sleep tonight for the inmates of Adiala Jail’s death cells, but though the rooms in Pakistan’s notorious northern prison are concrete, cold and small – they measure about 250cm by 150cm – discomfort is a side issue. This is because for the first time in years the men and women on Pakistan’s death rows have been given some hope about their future.
On August 25 a letter reached a Pakistan news agency from the prisoners at Adiala. It warmly congratulated the new president on his appointment and carried the reminder of a promise. “You had spoken on the floor of National Assembly that our government wants to commute death sentences,” they wrote to President Asif Ali Zardari, and to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. “We are now alive since then … Please, once again look into our matter.”
The reminder was badly needed. On June 21, Mr Gilani announced that, in tribute to its assassinated leader Benazir Bhutto, the new ruling party would like to commute the country’s 7,000 or so death sentences to life imprisonment. But four people have since been hanged, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). “We are being crushed by the system like a turnip,” wrote the prisoners. “There are so many innocent people in the jails of Pakistan… [but] no stay orders have been granted to those who are being hanged in the near future.”
For Pakistan’s reformers, who saw this as a step towards abolition, Mr Zardari’s promise has started to look empty, but the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) insists it was for real. Last Wednesday a law ministry official announced that a summary had been sent by the cabinet to the president’s office, where it awaited his signature. Pakistan ranks fourth in the world for executions after China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and is one of just five countries that hangs juveniles.
This isn’t the first time the death penalty has been debated in Pakistan. In the 1970s, then prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment, before being hanged himself after a coup. Fifteen years later his daughter, Benazir, kept all but a handful of those sentenced from the gallows while she was prime minister. This year the federal cabinet again made steps to commute death sentences, but caved under pressure from the right wing.
Mr Zardari’s camp has suggested that an announcement on the 7,000 prisoners now on death row, and even on abolition, could come at any time. “I’m sure they will do it,” says Nasir Aslam Zahid, former chief justice of the Sindh High Court. “This time they have got a chance. It has been 12 years since Benazir Bhutto’s government and this time they have control with the presidency, so they can easily implement her decision.”
Others look to the country’s many conservative MPs, its powerful mullahs and the lack of action so far and conclude that Mr Zardari doesn’t have the resolve.
“It was an exuberance. They don’t have the political will,” says lawyer Muneer Malik, who spent time in Adiala’s death cells himself last year after he ran protests for an independent judiciary. “It was just pandering to a particular lobby, putting up a liberal face before the European Union, which there’s pressure from. Otherwise the bill would already be in parliament.”
And for the condemned inmates? “Right now their chances look pretty bleak,” Mr Malik concluded.
Earlier this year the AHRC reported on the case of Zulfiqar Ali, a man on Adiala’s death row who had been convicted of murder but was not able to afford a lawyer; he had tried to mount his own defence even though he could not speak English. His brother, Abdul Qayum, remembers his family’s reaction when they heard of Mr Zardari’s announcement. “I was jumping with joy,” he remembers. “Where I was, I don’t know! Zulfiqar’s daughters were also jumping around in the street. When I told him he couldn’t speak for minutes”.
Nevertheless on October 2, Mr Qayum was summoned to a guard’s house in Lahore and showed the black warrant. “I felt like I was going deep into the earth, I couldn’t talk or say anything,” he says. “Then I collected my senses and I went to tell the rest of the family.”
Thanks to last ditch campaigning Zulfiqar got a last minute stay of 15 days. Under Islamic sharia law a murderer can be pardoned by a victim’s relatives, usually after a blood money payment called diyat, and the courts will often urge family members to resolve matters on the side; it’s what human rights NGOs call the `privatisation of justice’ and tends to give the wealthy a certain criminal freedom.
However what’s worse, say such groups, is that many death penalties are given because judges assume a settlement will be found. Ali’s family are poor and he has been in prison for 10 years. If diyat can’t be arranged this time around, his execution will take place this week.
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About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984. The above statement has only been forwarded by the AHRC.
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