ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa on Wednesday questioned how the ‘prison rules’ could determine the imprisonment of convicts for life, ie 25 years.

“Under what basis has it been written under Rule 140 and 198(b) of the Pakistan Prisons Rules that life term for the convict will be for 25 years when the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) does not suggest any specific life span,” observed the chief justice, heading a larger seven-judge bench.

The bench was constituted specially to settle the question of what should be the length of life imprisonment — either 25 years of incarceration, or sending the guilty behind bars for life. It is for the legislature to clarify by removing the confusion, the chief justice observed.

The issue caught the attention of the Supreme Court earlier when the chief justice, while heading a different bench, took up a case relating to the award of life imprisonment in the case of a man, Haroon Rashid, who was sentenced to life imprisonment 12 times in two different cases, but the question before the court was to determine whether the punishment should run consecutively or concurrently.

Rasheed has been in jail since 1997 and has served a 22-year sentence. According to Rashid’s lawyer Zulfikar Maluka, the court had allowed different sentences to be served concurrently. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court postponed further proceedings when the counsel expressed the desire to withdraw the petition since he still has a window of opportunity in moving a review petition in one of the two cases, though the review petition in another stands concluded.

The court asked the counsel to move an application seeking to condone the delay till when he will eventually file the review petition, adding that the court is not inclined to impair jurisprudence developed by the courts — otherwise there would be no end to litigation.

“How can we calculate the duration of life imprisonment of a convict when nobody knows how long he will survive,” the chief justice observed, adding that Indian courts had developed a concept by declaring it ‘judicial innovation’ and saying that after 14 years of incarceration, the convict will qualify for remission in his sentence. But in Pakistan’s jurisprudence, it is 15 years, the chief justice said, adding it was the right of the executive to grant remissions but it is the jurisdiction of the courts to award sentence.

Senior counsel Ahsan Bhoon and Azam Nazeer Tarar also pleaded before the apex court that they had been approached by different bar associations and therefore wanted to represent the point of view of the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) before the SC in determining the issue.

The PBC was not under notice but wanted to join current proceedings since people are “crying in jails as the quality of food served in prisons is very low and even medicines are not available”, Mr Tarar said.

Meanwhile, Additional Advo­cate General, Punjab, Qasim Nawaz Chowhan presented a brief before the apex court explaining that the terms ‘imprisonment for life’ or a ‘life sentence’ has never been defined in any law of Pakistan though the words ‘life’ and ‘imprisonment’ have been explained separately.

Section 45 of the PPC defines ‘life’ as the ‘life of the human’ and should therefore be read in the context of Section 45 of the PPC which ordinarily means imprisonment for the full or complete span of life.

Even so, a misconception in public and in certain corners of academics exists that ‘life imprisonment’ is for 15 years or 25 years. This misconception has developed because of the misreading of Section 57 of the PPC which, if read in isolation, will say that life imprisonment will be reckoned as equivalent to 25 years, the brief states.

It explains that Section 57 of the PPC has no real bearing on the meaning of ‘life imprisonment’. The government can confer clemency to the convict by releasing him after 15 years, or after any definite period like 25 years. The government is under no obligation to exercise such powers since hard-core criminals are never given such benefits.

This proposition makes it crystal clear that life imprisonment is being jailed for the remainder of life, thus imprisonment for life is not confined to 15 years, the brief says.

Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2019