AFTER nearly three years of state-sanctioned violence during which 465 condemned prisoners have been put to death, any move in the opposite direction is welcome news.

Possibly under pressure from Western countries and international human rights bodies — although one hopes also from a desire to serve the ends of justice — Pakistan has decided to review the scope of the death penalty and consider reducing the number of capital offences.

Having recently been elected member of the UN Human Rights Council, and with its Universal Periodic Review coming up, Pakistan could certainly do with one blot less on its dismal human rights record.

At present, there are 27 crimes in the country that are punishable by death: among these are offences such as railway sabotage, drug smuggling and arms trafficking.

There has never been a considered debate about the death penalty in Pakistan, only an emotional response framed in binary terms.

The very lifting of the moratorium on capital punishment following the APS Peshawar attack on December 2014 was a knee-jerk reaction to a gut-wrenching event.

For a state on the back foot, faced with a furious, grieving public, the quickest way to appear in control of a rapidly unravelling security situation was to execute some of the approximately 8,000 prisoners on death row as a form of ‘instant retribution’.

This became a pattern in Punjab — the province that carried out 83pc of all executions during this period — where hangings spiked in the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks.

Moreover, although the lifting of the moratorium, at least after the initial months, affected both those convicted of terrorism-related offences and those on death row for other capital crimes, only 16pc of executed prisoners had been convicted in the anti-terrorism courts — further evidence that the hangings were little more than a populist measure.

It stands to reason then that the decline in terrorist attacks has been on account of effective military action, rather than capital punishment acting as a deterrent, a theory anyway long debunked by multiple studies.

No debate about the death penalty is complete without considering the appalling state of the criminal justice system in Pakistan.

Unlike the privileged few who have the means to engage expensive legal counsel, the vast majority of litigants are at the mercy of state-appointed counsel too overburdened to provide a proper defence to those whose lives are on the line.

Shocking miscarriages of justice have come to light recently: prisoners executed before their appeals process had even been completed; juveniles sent to the gallows, death warrants issued for the physically infirm and the mentally ill, etc.

There have also been several cases where prisoners on death row have been acquitted after spending years behind bars.

That, if nothing else, is the most compelling argument against the final, irrevocable act of taking a person’s life.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2017