KARACHI: Speakers at a one-day conference on ‘Moving away from death penalty in Pakistan’ organised by the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) on Saturday reflected on capital punishment and what it meant for Pakistani society.

“Until 2014, there was a moratorium on the death penalty in Pakistan. Then when it was lifted after the terrible Army Public School incident, it was said that capital punishment applies only to terrorist-related cases, which did not happen, of course,” said member, Sindh NCHR Anis Haroon.

She regretted that the poor in Pakistan, who could not afford a good lawyer, spent years in jail before being hanged finally, which was like making them serve two sentences.

“Pakistan’s criminal justice system is defective,” said Justice Ali Nawaz Chohan, chairman NCHR. “And no, it not just the poor who are suffering and paying the price for not getting a good defence because there is also the case of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto before us. He was not a poor man,” he added.

“The law is not settled and jurisprudence exploits it. The best jurisprudence has unique courts but here we have Common Law, Sharia law, antiterrorist courts, drug courts, etc. There is a diversity of courts here,” he said.

Veteran journalist and human rights advocate I.A. Rehman said that it all boiled down to killing. “It is even worse when done by the state. There are people spending years in prison and reforming as a result of that and we kill them when they become better human beings,” he said.

“There was this man in prison, who educated himself up to the level of PhD and educated so many other inmates, but then he was hanged. There is this other man, who became an artist behind bars but then he was hanged as well,” he said.

“And then, too, you are not punishing the killer by ending his life, you are punishing his family,” he said.

Barrister Faisal Siddiqui said that while there was an intellectual international consensus against the death penalty, Pakistan was moving in the opposite direction. “Secular and Islamic provisions have made hotchpotch of our Constitution. We are a traumatised and brutalised society, which our state exploits,” he said.

Senator Saeed Ghani asked if anyone thought that a suicide bomber would be afraid of the death penalty. “And still we talk about reserving the death penalty for terrorists,” he said.

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2017