Call for milder punishment to juvenile offenders

Organisations working for the protection of the rights of children on Tuesday urged the judiciary to stop handing down ‘inhuman and degrading’ sentences to the child offenders. They said a large number of children are imprisoned ruthlessly and there are cases where child offenders, in far flung districts, have even been awarded death sentences.
The National Juvenile Justice Network members made these claims while addressing a news conference here. The moot was held in connection with the launch of a campaign to stress milder punishment for juvenile offenders in Pakistan. NJJN Coordinator Abdullah Khoso said that the organisation in association with Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) and Defence for Children International (DCI) has launched the postcard campaign demanding rights for younger offenders.
The postcard includes a joint letter sent to the prime minister of Pakistan by the NJJN, the CRIN and the DCI-IS. The campaign is part of a global campaign initiated by the CRIN against inhuman and degrading treatment for child offenders. Khoso said that 13 member organisations of the NJJN have observed that children are being put through ‘inhuman and degrading’ punishment for various reasons—the overriding powers of other laws over the JJSO, lack of implementation of the child rights provisions in the JJSO, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Child Protection and Welfare Act 2010 and the Sindh Children Act 1955.
Children, under these laws, may lawfully be sentenced to the death penalty, life imprisonment and corporal punishment. He said that child offenders are even tried in special courts under the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997 and the Control of Narcotic Substances Act 1997 both of which endorse the death penalty. The jail manual also authorises jail authorities to apply strict punishments for disciplining juveniles, he added.
He said that in June 2010 he met with Mewal Shah, 20, in Mach Jail Balochistan who was awarded a death sentence by the Anti-Terrorism Court in Mastung. After four years in solitary confinement in death cell, his sentence was commuted by the Balochistan High Court into 25 years’ rigorous imprisonment. During his stay in the death cell he went through a serious psychological trauma and incarceration process, he observed.
He said that four other juvenile offenders are living in death cells of the same jail and are going through the same psychological trauma like Mewal. “These boys are Bhai Khan Chandio, 17, Naseerullah Langov 17, Sarfaraz 16, and Zahoor Jakhrani, 16. All of them were awarded death sentence on the account of murders by different lower courts in Balochistan and their appeals were pending in the high court.