ISLAMABAD: As the scourge of polio continues to cripple children across the country, the Supreme Court has given the provinces one month to conduct a survey to determine whether any children or suckling babies who live in prison with their mothers have been left out of immunisation campaigns.

Over 250 Pakistani children have been stricken by the deadly virus this year, but the court’s orders came during the hearing of a mercy appeal, filed by seven members of a family who were in judicial custody. Sawera is the daughter of Naseeban Khatoon, who had been incarcerated at the Special Prison for Women, Karachi, since August 2008. The child had contracted polio and lost the ability to walk.

Even though the family was eventually acquitted, the court, while clearing backlog cases, was perturbed to learn that a baby had contracted polio in prison and wondered whether she was ever administered the polio vaccine in custody, where there should be no hindrance to immunising the children living there.

The order, handed down by a three-judge bench headed by Justice Ijaz Chaudhry, specifically calls on the Sindh chief secretary to establish whether this was due to dereliction of duty on the part of jail authorities or the prison doctor. The court also ordered the provincial government to fix responsibility for polio drops not being administered to the baby inside prison, Sindh Additional Advocate General Qasim Mir Jath told Dawn.

Court perturbed by report that baby in judicial custody contracted polio

The family in question was booked on murder charges by the Pirabad Police Station in Karachi’s SITE Town in 2007. A mercy application – signed by widow Gul Khatoon, her daughters Hameeda, Naseeban and Noor Bibi, and sons Imran, Nawaz and Ghulam Abbas – was sent to the chief justice of Pakistan in May 2009. In the interim, however, Ghulam Abbas passed away while in prison.

The family’s bail applications were turned down by a trial court and the Sindh High Court. But the family insisted that they had been booked on trumped-up charges.

The fact that Sawera was afflicted with polio while in prison is also mentioned in the mercy application, which states that there was no proper treatment available in the prison for the child.

The applicants stated in the application that they were ordinary domestic women but were falsely implicated in the murder case only to disturb the entire family, especially when the children were shelterless with nobody to look after them.

The applicants had appealed before the Supreme Court to order their immediate release on bail. During Wednesday’s proceedings, Mir Jath told the court that all the women and two of their sons had been acquitted by the West Karachi additional sessions judge in June 2011, except for Nawaz, who was awarded the death penalty.

Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2014