The writer spent 18 years on death row in Pakistan for the murder of a taxi driver. He was released last year after President Pervez Musharraf commuted his sentence to life imprisonment following strong international pressure, much of it exerted by the British government.

THEY tried to kill me. They said they would and they meant it. The family of the dead man said it was their prerogative under Islamic law to pardon or execute. They claimed that the law was on their side and the court’s blessings. They were not moved by countless mediation attempts including the ones mounted by the government’s bigwigs. I even wrote to them asking for forgiveness. They would not sway, motivated by ‘tribal honour and vengeance’. So I was to die.

As I reminisce, this time last year I was on death row in Pakistan and my fate uncertain. I’d been convicted of a murder on the basis of ‘circumstantial and fabricated’ evidence that was actually an accident. My appeals were virtually exhausted and all doors seemed to close on me one by one.

What saved me? Well, not the Pakistani legal system itself, that’s for sure. I was tried and acquitted twice, and put back on the death row. The way I was tossed about by the courts in Pakistan gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘double jeopardy’. It didn’t seem to matter that my trials were shoddy, the presumption of innocence was not followed or that there was no eyewitness evidence (supposedly essential for my final death sentence, as there is higher burden of proof to discharge under Islamic law).

All roads seemed to lead to my execution. As soon as there was light at the end of the tunnel — an acquittal, a commutation — the process would start all over again. All the legal, constitutional and Islamic norms were broken to punish me unjustly. The lives of my family were blighted by my ordeal; my father died a dejected man, four years ago. My heart ached when I learned from relatives of my mother’s cries and anguish. Death sentence is a collective punishment and who should know this more than me? To this day we are traumatised; it’s affected us physically, psychologically and financially. The emotional scars run deep and seem ‘un-repairable’.

My 18 years on death row were a living nightmare. Imagine a 12feet by ninefeet cell.

The wailing of other condemned prisoners all around you, especially at night; unsympathetic guards who never tire of taunting you, the boredom and the nauseous fear and then the sudden jolt when you hear the other prisoners being taken away to the gallows. The bitter-sweet sensation of waking up from a dream, of being back home, safe only to be engulfed with the sickening realisation of where you actually are again.

Days drag by slowly and you stop keeping an account. Before you realise, an eternity has passed, years have disappeared — wasted.

This is just a tiny taste of what my half-life in the shadow of the gallows was like. In 18 years I personally knew about 50 fellow prisoners who were taken out and hanged. Some of these had been men I’d got to know quite well, teaching them English in makeshift classes that I sometimes arranged. Better educated, able to hold a halting conversation with the “young fellow from England”, they were still taken out of their cells, strung up and killed.

Maybe some people think this is only right. You shouldn’t worry about the killers, the sadists and the child murderers, they might say. Worry instead about their victims — they’re not even alive. Well, I can say with all sincerity that I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for the victims of violent crime.

But violence isn’t solved by violence, and having seen the emotional brutality — the cold-blooded depravity — of capital punishment, I am convinced that not only is the death penalty not part of the solution, it is actually part of the problem. It stands for violence, futility and revenge. It’s got nothing to do with justice and only breeds further violence and disrespect for life. What about the causes of crimes, the social, economic, cultural, religious and political conflict of the society that pits brother against brother, citizen against citizen?

It is easy for the outside world to justify by saying ‘prisoners are all criminals and scum’; the question is: what about the state of society that generated them? Of course, I fully agree that people should be prosecuted and held accountable for their actions. Does it have to be death?

Pakistan, for example, executed 82 people last year, the third highest number in the world. It has got another 7,000 people languishing on death row — more than any nation in the world. Yet its crime rate is far higher than Europe, where capital punishment isn’t used at all.

It’s not about deterrence, it’s all about religion and politics. If President Musharraf in Pakistan thought it was politically advantageous he would stop Pakistan’s conveyor belt of death overnight. It’s not about implementing God’s laws either, what about the social, economic and political justice that is talked about in the Quran? What about the due process and sanctity and dignity attached to life?

So what saved me? In a nutshell — my nationality. Being a British citizen saved my skin. President Musharraf suddenly started receiving pleas from all over the world, EU leaders, UN special rapporteurs, British ministers, Tony Blair and Prince Charles. My brother Amjad rallied support from all over the country and Amnesty International mobilised their membership. First the politicians here couldn’t ignore it and eventually politicians in Pakistan couldn’t ignore it.

I was lucky. I survived death row. Like me, many of Pakistan’s death row inmates were innocent or had unfair trials, but unlike me they are likely to go to their deaths with no one able to save them.

Pakistan’s death row is a stain on its reputation. President Musharraf, who was able to do the right thing in my case, should demonstrate the political courage to freeze all executions in Pakistan. If he did this, he would, in one fell swoop, save innocent lives and raise the human rights standing of his entire country.

Can the religious, secular leaders and jurists with their hands on their heart say that the system of capital jurisdiction in that country provides fairness or accuracy in the administration of the death penalty with due process? That there have been no evidential failings or miscarriage or that the innocent have not been executed? I hope they will reflect upon this when 129 countries including about 19 Muslim countries and members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference have moratoriums in place. Does it make Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brunei Darussalam, Morocco or for that matter Tunisia and Turkey any less Islamic by not executing people?

I want to thank President Musharraf for sparing my life, but also earnestly implore him, the rest of the executive, the judiciary and the legislator to think about the rest.