It was a moment when the adage about people living in glass houses and being circumspect about throwing stones sprang to mind.

The anguished response by the Foreign Office and Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan to the execution of two opposition politicians in Bangladesh on Sunday referred to their “flawed trials” and the “violation of human rights” that their sentences had constituted.

To anyone not viewing the issue in isolation, the double standard was obvious, and rights activist Asma Jahangir soon called out the government on it.

The former Supreme Court Bar Association president criticised the “disproportionately high passion” that the government had displayed in the matter in comparison with its silence on the unfair trials in which Pakistan’s own citizens were being sentenced to death. Here she was referring to the hangings that have been taking place in the country’s prisons, to the sentences being handed down by the military courts — unprecedented in the opaqueness of their proceedings — as well as to the Pakistanis who are regularly executed on drug smuggling charges in Saudi Arabia.

Ms Jahangir’s stand is a courageous and principled one, particularly given the current hyper-nationalistic environment in which insistence on human rights and due process for all is seen as not only subversive but is perversely projected as collusion with the very militants against whom the state is fighting.

The country’s criminal justice system is known to be deeply problematic. Despite this, around 300 condemned prisoners have been hanged in Pakistan since the government lifted the moratorium on the death penalty last December; contrary to the avowed aim of the aforementioned measure, only a small proportion of them had been convicted for terrorism.

A paraplegic, who had been kept on death row despite his condition, was about to be sent to the gallows yesterday when he was given a last-minute reprieve, though only for two months.

Miscarriage of justice is a reality for many Pakistanis — although not, of course, for those living in their ivory towers.

Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2015