The government has lifted its moratorium on the death penalty in all capital cases, officials said Tuesday, after restarting executions for terrorism offences in the wake of a Taliban school massacre.
The Interior Ministry has directed provincial governments to proceed with hangings for prisoners who had exhausted all avenues of appeal and clemency, a senior interior ministry official told foreign news agency AFP.
Another government official confirmed the news.
Pakistan has hanged 24 convicts since resuming executions in December after Taliban militants gunned down more than 150 people, most of them children, at Peshawar’s Army Public School.
The partial lifting of the moratorium only applied to those convicted of terrorism offences, but officials said it has now been extended.
“The government has lifted the moratorium on the death penalty,” the senior Interior Ministry official said. “The Interior Ministry has directed the provincial home departments to expedite the executions of all condemned prisoners whose mercy petitions have been rejected by the president.”
Until December’s resumption, there had been no civilian hangings in Pakistan since 2008.
Only one person was executed in that time ─ a soldier convicted by a court martial and hanged in November 2012.
Rights campaign group Amnesty International estimates that Pakistan has more than 8,000 prisoners on death row, most of whom have exhausted the appeals process.
Supporters of the death penalty in Pakistan argue that it is the only effective way to deal with the scourge of militancy.
The courts system is notoriously slow, with cases frequently dragging on for years, and there is a heavy reliance on witness testimony and very little protection for judges and prosecutors.
This means terror cases are hard to prosecute, as extremists are able to intimidate witnesses and lawyers into dropping charges
Rights groups and the European Union have been highly critical of the resumption of executions.
Pakistan government's announcement of its intention to hang all convicted murderers and not just those convicted of terrorism is the right decision and corrects earlier anomaly according to which only those convicted of terrorism were to be executed. Of course, discriminating even among murderers was not the right thing to do because all murderers, convicted by the courts through due process of law, and for whom all remedial measures like appeals to higher courts as well as mercy appeals to the top state official have been exhausted, deserve to die.
Those who oppose capital punishment in Pakistan, in addition to declaring the capital punishment as 'inhuman' also raise objection to it stating that because of faulty investigation and prosecution procedures as well as prevailing inefficiency and corruption in the whole process of dispensation of justice, the convictions are not always transparent and could result in innocent persons being executed. While it is true that the whole system is far from transparent, a closer took at it will show that the weakness and corruption in system mostly work out to the benefit of the guilty. We often see this when the judges scold the law enforces who, having been influenced by powerful people, through financial inducements or fears for personal safety when the accused belonged to a murderous group, build weakness in the case which forces the judges to acquit them on technical grounds even when they are five hundred percent sure of the guilt of the accused.
Because of the aforementioned facts, if a person has been given capital punishment by a Pakistani court, in 99.99 percent of cases, the chances are that he more than deserved the sentence. However, at least theoretically there remains a very minute possibility of an innocent person being wrongly convicted and executed, eliminating any chance of giving him some relief which would have been possible had he been given life sentence and not hanged. However, I would personally think that even for such a person, having him hoping and waiting for years and decades for the information proving him innocent to emerge, and which may not happen at all, it would have been better even for him to be executed and get over with instead of making suffer suffer a life-long, painful wait.
Additionally, even a few years or months imprisonment of an innocent person causes an injustice which can not be undone, because we cannot bring back his past years. So, the logical extension of the argument against capital punishment would be the abolition of even the imprisonment. Now would that make sense?
There is also the question that as between murderer and his innocent victim or victims, who better deserves our sympathy? Now, I would think that being sympathetic to savage murderers necessarily amounts to being unfair to their innocent victims as also to their near and dear ones, who will suffer additional grief and agony seeing the killer not being given the due punishment. There is also the added risk that while being kept alive and fed in the prison, he may escape and kill others. After all, the stories of dangerous prisoners on death row escaping and doing it again are not uncommon. We know that in one incident, hundred of dangerous criminals escaped from Bannu prison. Prompt executions could at least prevent such additional killings.
Also, substantial resources have to be allocated to preventing the dangerous, convicted murderers' escape from high-security prisons. Now could not these resources in men and material be saved by executing the condemned prisoners and used instead for providing security to innocent persons who definitely deserve it better than these brutes?
And finally, while some Western countries make big fuss over the execution of convicted prisoners, they stay silent and take no meaningful action against mass murderers within their borders. Of the two mass murderers of the recent times who between them have the blood of nearly a million innocent Iraqis on their hands, Tony Blair was subjected to a minor inquiry and now holds the prestigious position of being the Envoy for Middle East peace, representing United States, European Union, Russia as well as the United Nations whose own Secretary General Kofi Annan had declared the Iraq invasion to be illegal. As for George Bush, he was not subjected even to a minor inquiry and enjoys a comfortable life. And human rights organizations the world over which are so vocal against the execution of convicted murderers also did not launch any serious campaign against Tony Blair and George Bush.
Karachi
Oh my goodness! Incredible article dude! Thank you so much,
However I am having problems with your RSS. …………………………….
is this true? If it is not looked at humanity, but depends also on the self-made
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