Repatriation for Zulfiqar

Zulfiqar Ali, 53 years old, knows he will die very soon. Locked in an Indonesian jail on death row for 14 years he has been diagnosed now with stage 4 liver cancer and wishes to spend his final days with his family. Zulfiqar is one of the 8,000 or so Pakistani prisoners held in jails overseas. The majority of these prisoners are held in Saudi Arabia. Many have had very little access to legal help and only sporadic assistance from Pakistani missions based in these nations. The case of Zulfiqar, the father of five children is particularly disturbing. After entering Indonesia in 2001, he was arrested in 2004 on charges of possessing 300 grams of heroin. He was sentenced to death for this offence despite the many legal travesties that occurred, including not being provided with a lawyer and struggling to present his own case before the court despite his very little English and complete lack of Indonesian. The Indian national who had initially brought the charge against Zulfiqar has since retracted his allegations.

Zulfiqar’s current lawyers maintain he is innocence and that extremely serious violations of the justice process occurred throughout his trial and appeal. In July 2016, he was scheduled to be executed by firing squad but received a last minute reprieve after pressure from Pakistani human rights groups and the embassy. He however remains on death row. In heart-rending appeals his aged mother and sister have called upon Indonesian authorities to allow Zulfiqar to die at home in his own country. His wife in Indonesia is also struggling for this. Zulfiqar himself says that innocence or guilt is now of no consequence. He knows he has only about three months to live and would like to spend this time with his family at home. We can only hope that the horrendous failure of the justice system in the case of Zulfiqar and the current humanitarian situation posed by his severe sickness will lead to mercy. Any man whose guilt has never been proven and who has spent 14 years in a death cell in a country far from home deserves mercy. This is even more true given his terminal sickness. Zulfiqar had left Lahore to create for himself and his family a better life. Instead he became caught up in a terrible case where justice was miscarried and his life effectively taken away from him. Other Pakistanis have suffered similar tragedies far from home. The least that can now be done for Zulfiqar is allow him to return home and end the little time he has left in the country he left almost two decades ago.