ISLAMABAD, Dec 11: The Supreme Court directed the government on Tuesday to submit details about prisoners on death row in the country.

The order was issued by a three-judge bench comprising Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali, Justice Tariq Parvez and Justice Ejaz Afzal Khan on a petition filed by Barrister Zafarullah Khan of the Watan Party who had drawn the court’s attention to the ordeal faced by such inmates.

The petition pointed out that 6,355 prisoners were awaiting execution in Punjab alone.

Barrister Khan regretted that the prisoners were suffering because the government was still pondering over the issue of commuting the pending death sentences into life term.

He informed the bench that appeals of 896 of the 6,355 prisoners on death row against their convictions were pending before the Supreme Court.

The president was seized with about 355 mercy petitions on which he had to make up his mind, he said, adding that the GHQ was seized with appeals of four military personnel and the Federal Shariat Court 27 appeals.

The PPP government, which had announced moratorium on executions since November 2008, carried out its first execution this year when Mohammed Hussain, a soldier who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2009 for murdering one of his colleagues, was hanged in November.

This is not the first time that the ordeal of inmates on death row has been highlighted before the Supreme Court. In 2008, the court had taken up a suo motu notice on a news report that 7,000 inmates on death row were waiting for execution. The court had asked the government if it was serious about bringing out any legislation to commute death sentence into life term.

On June 21, 2008, former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had announced that his government would recommend to the president to commute death sentence of thousands of prisoners into life imprisonment as part of a birthday tribute to slain PPP leader Benazir Bhutto.

According to reports, 62 countries in the world still maintain death penalty while 92 countries have abolished it completely. Ten countries retain it but only for the crimes committed during war times.

During the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government in the 1070s, life sentence was increased to 25 from 14 years with an idea to completely abolish the capital punishment in the years to come.

But the Ziaul Haq regime retained both the 25-year life sentence and the death penalty.