WITH capital punishment still on the statute books, Pakistan’s criminal justice system has a long way to go before it can be considered humane. That mentally ill prisoners are on death row awaiting execution is even more repugnant to human rights. The Supreme Court is at present seized with a review petition moved by three death row prisoners suffering from mental illness. They have asked the five-judge special bench to review an apex court decision from 2015, which held that the individuals had been rightly convicted, and that there were no mitigating circumstances for reduction in their sentence. Barrister Haider Rasul Mirza, as amicus curiae, offered some suggestions before the court on Wednesday that are worth considering. Among these, he proposed that prison rules be amended to provide for regular psychiatric evaluation of death row inmates to determine the state of their mental health. Barrister Mirza also suggested that the law should be amended to provide for a mental health facility in the medical wing of at least one major prison in each province.
Pakistan is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that urges countries practicing the death penalty to not impose it “on a person suffering from any mental or intellectual disabilities or to execute any such person”. Capital punishment — which Dawn opposes on principle — is retributive in nature, but to carry it out on a person who cannot comprehend why he or she is being punished serves no purpose whatsoever. Ghulam Abbas, one of the aforementioned petitioners, was to be hanged in June 2019, but the Supreme Court stayed his execution — a mere two days before it was to be carried out. In October 2017, the apex court stayed the execution of another petitioner, Imdad Ali. It was while hearing his case in 2016 that the court declared that schizophrenia did not count as a legally defined mental disorder. One can only hope that the criminal justice system is moving towards a better understanding of mental disorders.
Published in Dawn, January 8th, 2021
