By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Feb 13 2007 (IPS)

The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights have called for an immediate moratorium on death penalties in Pakistan – or many innocent people may be executed.

There are “very serious defects” in Pakistan’s criminal, police and justice system, the rights organisations charge in their joint fact-finding report ‘Slow March to Gallows’, launched late January. There is also “chronic corruption” and bias against women and religious minorities.

All this has made the capital punishment system in Pakistan “discriminatory and unjust” and allowed for the “high probability” of miscarriage of justice. “Until we wait for the imperfect system to be corrected many people, including quite a few innocents, will have been hanged,” I.A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), told IPS. There should be an immediate freeze on executions of those already sentenced, he said.

HRCP council member Zohra Yusuf added: “We are for abolition. A moratorium is proposed to give immediate relief in the interim period.” A moratorium would spare those convicted under Pakistan’s controversial Blasphemy Law. Minority religious groups in Pakistan, especially Christians, have long charged that this law was being used to persecute them.

The United States-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has welcomed HRCP’s call for a moratorium as a first step to abolition. “The use of the death penalty must end, period,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, South Asia researcher for HRW, adding that HRCP was highlighting the “very serious plight of large numbers of prisoners on death row.”

Currently there are more than 7,400 prisoners on death row, some of whom have been there for decades. Rights groups say executions have been increasing, with 1,029 carried out between 1975 and 2002 in the Punjab province alone. In the first half of 2006, the number of people executed was 54.

At the time of independence, in 1947, only murder and treason carried the death sentence. But today there are 27 capital crimes, including blasphemy, stripping a woman of her clothes in public and sabotage of the railway system. Many of these were introduced during the 1977-88 military dictatorship of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

It was under Gen. Zia’s rule that former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was executed despite worldwide appeals for clemency. Bhutto was hanged on Apr. 4, 1979 on the charge of conspiring to murder a political opponent, after what was widely held to be an unfair and politicised trial. His appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected by four judges out of seven and one of the four stated afterwards that he regretted his decision.

HRCP has urged the government to put a restriction on the number of offences carrying death sentence and refrain from adding new ones, but Rehman said he did not expect an immediate government response to their call. “The government is a thick-hide mule. We do not expect an early breakthrough. It has other priorities,” he said.

By calling for a moratorium rather than a complete abolition of capital punishment, HRCP hopes to start a debate and “allow the government and the public to thrash out issues and reach a consensus,’’ Rehman said. “Laws made without public concurrence rarely succeed.’’

Rehman conceded that the abolitionists would have to work hard to convince the public about their cause. “The public, at the moment, does not seem interested or supportive of abolition. People have been brutalised. They are also much too confounded by clerics claiming that killing is enjoined by faith. They would like to see more heads rolling than fewer,” he said.

Giving an example of how the abolitionists might press their case in Pakistan, Rehman said: “One could argue, for instance, that murder apart, there is no sanction in Islam or in our legal tradition for awarding death in many of the cases that have been added to the capital offences list.”

On the issue of deterrence, HRCP is arguing that the “certainty of conviction not the harshness of punishment,” was decisive in reducing crime. “Capital punishment or any other punishment can be deterrent only in states where the legal order is not strong enough to prevent the wrongdoer escaping. We should be at the stage where even a minor punishment should act as a deterrent: Then there would be no need to hang anyone,” explained Rehman.

There is also the question of reforms in Pakistan’s judiciary, police, and executive which are considered essential issues. “Wherever justice has moved from retribution to reformation and meeting people’s economic needs, the crime rate has fallen,’’ said Rehman.

He stressed that Pakistan’s religion-based Qisas and Diyat Ordinance, highly criticised by rights activists for miscarriage of justice, must be reformed. This law allows families of murder victims to accept compensation and pardon the offender. “It gives the victim’s family veto-power to decide whether a convict should live or die,” Rehman said. “It’s a privatisation of justice because murder, which is a crime both against the victim and society, is reduced to a matter between the killer and the victim’s family. Society is deprived of its say.’’

HRCP’s Yusuf adds that the ordinance allows the rich to ‘’literally get away with murder by paying the ‘blood money’ while the poor are hanged. The law will have to go if death penalty is abolished.’’

Besides calling for a moratorium, the HRCP report presses for several administrative measures to be introduced. These include greater accessibility for members of civil society to prisons and contact with condemned prisoners. It wants a strengthening of the police investigation system, an increase in spending on the police and justice system and a mechanism for protection of victims and witnesses taking part in criminal procedures.

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