penalty would be used in cases related to terrorism, but in March 2015 it lifted the moratorium on all capital offences. Of the 485 executions, only 30 percent were convicted of terrorism.
Not only is this a problem because Pakistan expanded the death penalty but, given Pakistan’s broken criminal justice system, there are too many innocents who fall through the cracks as Pakistan continues to violate the ICCPR. There are many who have either been executed, or wrongfully convicted and are also mentally ill and/or physically disabled.
When questioned on the death penalty, the Pakistani delegation’s responses were that it is used to deter crime and it was a national consensus that it be used. However, the data shows otherwise. According to Justice Project Pakistan, Punjab accounts for 83 percent of executions and 89 percent of death sentences in Pakistan. However, it only had a 9.7 percent drop in murder rates from 2015-2016. Sindh had a drop of 25 percent during the same time – even though it had 18 executions compared to Punjab’s 382.
In India the perpetrators of the gang rape of Jyoti Singh in 2012 were sentenced to death, but from January–April 2014, 616 rape cases were registered in Delhi according to the Delhi police. In May 2017, the General Secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, Annie Raja, stated that the “death penalty is not enough to prevent such heinous crimes.”
For the argument that the death penalty curbs terrorism, research shows that terrorists are resistant to deterrence by punishment as many are committing suicide. Upon executions, their political objectives are vindicated. The argument that the moratorium was lifted with a national consensus is a stretch. The political parties agreed, after APS, to implement a strategy to combat terrorism. But, according to MNA Shazia Marri of the PPP, there was an opposition within parliament regarding the expansion of the death penalty in 2015.
According to a focus group conducted during JPP’s campaign during World Day Against the Death Penalty, 93 percent of the respondents said ‘no’ to juveniles and physically disabled people being sentenced to death. Sixty-four percent said ‘yes’ to reducing the scope of the death penalty and 53 percent said ‘yes’ to the moratorium being restored until Pakistan corrects the faults within the justice system.
What Pakistan needs to do now is implement these recommendations. We should start with reducing the scope of the death penalty straightaway if we want to lose the macabre accolade of retaining the world’s largest death row. Pakistan must treat this as an emergency, restore the moratorium, and make changes to its criminal justice system immediately.
The writer works with Justice Project Pakistan, a human rights organisation based in Lahore.
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