KARACHI, Dec 19: The state should be responsible for payment of Diyet (compensation or blood money) to the heirs of murder victims on behalf of poor offenders, lawyers demanded at a seminar here on Thursday.

The seminar on the problems of death cell inmates, held by an NGO in collaboration with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR), also demanded that murder convicts not be lodged in condemned prisoners’ cells till all their appeals had been heard and all legal remedies exhausted. In fact, they be interned in death cells only when the heirs of their victims and the president had finally and irrevocably rejected their compromise pleas and mercy appeals.

Speaking at the seminar, LCHR President Aqil Lodhi said prisoners faced innumerable problems when they were put in death cells. They could not meet their relations like other prisoners and were subjected to other restrictions not applicable to ordinary jail inmates.

Other speakers, including Dr Zaki Mohammed, Dr Abdul Mateen, Dr Abdur Rauf and Jamal Ahmed Khan, said prisoners lodged in death cells for long periods suffered irreparable psychological damage. Either the law should be amended or the executive and the judiciary otherwise ensured that their appeals were promptly decided. There was a worldwide campaign against death penalty, or at least to make the infliction of the sentence as painless as possible.

The speakers said proper homework was not done before insertion of the Diyet and Qisas law into the penal code of Pakistan. The result was that while the rich, prosperous and influential offenders get scot free on payment of blood money to the heirs, sometimes even coercing them to grant pardon, the poor convicts must face death or rot in jail for indefinite periods. An Islamic state is under an obligation to solve problems arising from enforcement of Islamic laws, they said.