Here you go! We top something. However, its not something to be proud of. In Pakistan there are many different views (religious, cultural, humanistic, etc.) on whether it is right or wrong to execute convicted criminals, but personally I am of the view that it is unnecessary. From years of deterrence studies there is overwhelming evidence that death penalty is, at best, no more of a deterrent than a life sentence in prison. Many human rights organizations are trying to get it abolished, however, it might not be that easy. I know where I stand on this, but I am certain that the readers would be divided on this issue.
There is also the case of unlawful tribal executions. Amnesty Internatioanl asks people to protest against the unlawful execuation of Hayatullah Gul, 25, by the father of the taxi driver whom he had been alleged to kill two weeks earlier.
Amnesty’s report states:
on the orders of a shura, or council of persons described in Pakistani media as “local Taleban”, in Tiarza, South Waziristan. He was shot dead by the father of a taxi driver whom Hayatullah Gul is alleged to have murdered around two weeks earlier. The “trial” reportedly took only a few hours to complete. The accused had no legal counsel to assist him and no possibility to challenge the conviction and punishment. He reportedly pleaded guilty and was allowed to ask forgiveness from the victim’s family, which was refused.
Click link for the Amnestry report on Death Penalty Statistics for 2006. Also, read the BBC’s report on this. Below that you will find Mirza Tahir Hussain’s article that was published in Dawn titled ‘How I survived death row’. It does an excellent job of arguing in favour of abolishing death penalty. DO READ IT! I would have posted it first, but I wanted to put forward the facts and figures before the story of the man who sufferend injustice for 17 years wondering what would happen to him and all along he was put under the fear of death. In this case the justice system failed. When justice is not done and innocent people are sentenced to death then the state has blood on its hands.
Pakistan ‘tops death row league’
Pakistan has more people imprisoned facing execution than any other country in the world, human rights group Amnesty International says.
Nearly a third of the world’s 24,000 death row prisoners are in Pakistan - “often held in extremely over-crowded conditions”, Amnesty says.
Its annual report on the death penalty said the number of people executed in 2006 fell by 25%, compared with 2005.
But Pakistan was one of a few countries where executions rose sharply.
Pakistan’s interior minister has dismissed any suggestion of abolishing the death penalty.
‘Grim Toll’
The Amnesty report said that at least 1,591 people had been executed in 25 countries last year, compared with 2,148 people in 2005.
It said the vast majority of those executed in 2006 were in China (1,010), followed by Iran (177), Pakistan (82), Iraq (65), Sudan (65) and the US (53).
The figure in Pakistan had nearly trebled from 31 the previous year, Amnesty said.
The group’s UK Director, Kate Allen, said: “Last year saw a slight drop in execution numbers but it was another grim death toll around the world.
“We are particularly concerned about a disturbing ‘revival’ of executions in countries like Iraq, Sudan and Pakistan.
“We urgently need to see ‘death penalty governments’ issuing bans on all imminent executions, especially President Musharraf in Pakistan.”
However, Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao told the BBC: “We have our own laws, inherited from British times and they are applied very judiciously.
“We feel that the death sentence is a deterrent, without it maybe there would be more cases of serious crimes like murders.”
Amnesty says 91% of all executions take place in the six countries listed above. Many are sentenced after torture and unfair trials, the group says.
Amnesty says that more than 7,200 people are on death row in Pakistan, a figure which was roughly similar six months ago.
But the sharp jump in numbers of people being executed makes this a particularly deadly combination, the group says.
It criticised death row conditions in Pakistan.
“In some cases 12 death row prisoners are reportedly being held in 4m-by-3m cells designed for one person,” the group said.
It said wealthier convicts were often able to escape execution under laws which allow relatives of murder victims to accept compensation and pardon the offender.
Trend ‘down’
Amnesty said its execution figures were “minimum only” and that countries like China killed far more people than official statistics showed.
But the report did note new safeguards in China meaning that all death sentences now had to be approved by China’s Supreme People’s Court.
And it said “the underlying global trend is towards less frequent usage and lower numbers of death sentences being imposed”.
To date 128 countries had abolished the death penalty, with the Philippines the latest of 30 states to do so in the past 10 years.
“While 69 countries still retain the punishment less than half that number are currently carrying out executions,” the report said.
By Mirza Tahir Hussain
The writer spent 18 years on death row in Pakistan for the murder of a taxi driver. He was released last year after President Pervez Musharraf commuted his sentence to life imprisonment following strong international pressure, much of it exerted by the British government.
THEY tried to kill me. They said they would and they meant it. The family of the dead man said it was their prerogative under Islamic law to pardon or execute. They claimed that the law was on their side and the court’s blessings. They were not moved by countless mediation attempts including the ones mounted by the government’s bigwigs. I even wrote to them asking for forgiveness. They would not sway, motivated by ‘tribal honour and vengeance’. So I was to die.
As I reminisce, this time last year I was on death row in Pakistan and my fate uncertain. I’d been convicted of a murder on the basis of ‘circumstantial and fabricated’ evidence that was actually an accident. My appeals were virtually exhausted and all doors seemed to close on me one by one.
What saved me? Well, not the Pakistani legal system itself, that’s for sure. I was tried and acquitted twice, and put back on the death row. The way I was tossed about by the courts in Pakistan gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘double jeopardy’. It didn’t seem to matter that my trials were shoddy, the presumption of innocence was not followed or that there was no eyewitness evidence (supposedly essential for my final death sentence, as there is higher burden of proof to discharge under Islamic law).
All roads seemed to lead to my execution. As soon as there was light at the end of the tunnel — an acquittal, a commutation — the process would start all over again. All the legal, constitutional and Islamic norms were broken to punish me unjustly. The lives of my family were blighted by my ordeal; my father died a dejected man, four years ago. My heart ached when I learned from relatives of my mother’s cries and anguish. Death sentence is a collective punishment and who should know this more than me? To this day we are traumatised; it’s affected us physically, psychologically and financially. The emotional scars run deep and seem ‘un-repairable’.
My 18 years on death row were a living nightmare. Imagine a 12feet by ninefeet cell.
The wailing of other condemned prisoners all around you, especially at night; unsympathetic guards who never tire of taunting you, the boredom and the nauseous fear and then the sudden jolt when you hear the other prisoners being taken away to the gallows. The bitter-sweet sensation of waking up from a dream, of being back home, safe only to be engulfed with the sickening realisation of where you actually are again.
Days drag by slowly and you stop keeping an account. Before you realise, an eternity has passed, years have disappeared — wasted.
This is just a tiny taste of what my half-life in the shadow of the gallows was like. In 18 years I personally knew about 50 fellow prisoners who were taken out and hanged. Some of these had been men I’d got to know quite well, teaching them English in makeshift classes that I sometimes arranged. Better educated, able to hold a halting conversation with the “young fellow from England”, they were still taken out of their cells, strung up and killed.
Maybe some people think this is only right. You shouldn’t worry about the killers, the sadists and the child murderers, they might say. Worry instead about their victims — they’re not even alive. Well, I can say with all sincerity that I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for the victims of violent crime.
But violence isn’t solved by violence, and having seen the emotional brutality — the cold-blooded depravity — of capital punishment, I am convinced that not only is the death penalty not part of the solution, it is actually part of the problem. It stands for violence, futility and revenge. It’s got nothing to do with justice and only breeds further violence and disrespect for life. What about the causes of crimes, the social, economic, cultural, religious and political conflict of the society that pits brother against brother, citizen against citizen?
It is easy for the outside world to justify by saying ‘prisoners are all criminals and scum’; the question is: what about the state of society that generated them? Of course, I fully agree that people should be prosecuted and held accountable for their actions. Does it have to be death?
Pakistan, for example, executed 82 people last year, the third highest number in the world. It has got another 7,000 people languishing on death row — more than any nation in the world. Yet its crime rate is far higher than Europe, where capital punishment isn’t used at all.
It’s not about deterrence, it’s all about religion and politics. If President Musharraf in Pakistan thought it was politically advantageous he would stop Pakistan’s conveyor belt of death overnight. It’s not about implementing God’s laws either, what about the social, economic and political justice that is talked about in the Quran? What about the due process and sanctity and dignity attached to life?
So what saved me? In a nutshell — my nationality. Being a British citizen saved my skin. President Musharraf suddenly started receiving pleas from all over the world, EU leaders, UN special rapporteurs, British ministers, Tony Blair and Prince Charles. My brother Amjad rallied support from all over the country and Amnesty International mobilised their membership. First the politicians here couldn’t ignore it and eventually politicians in Pakistan couldn’t ignore it.
I was lucky. I survived death row. Like me, many of Pakistan’s death row inmates were innocent or had unfair trials, but unlike me they are likely to go to their deaths with no one able to save them.
Pakistan’s death row is a stain on its reputation. President Musharraf, who was able to do the right thing in my case, should demonstrate the political courage to freeze all executions in Pakistan. If he did this, he would, in one fell swoop, save innocent lives and raise the human rights standing of his entire country.
Can the religious, secular leaders and jurists with their hands on their heart say that the system of capital jurisdiction in that country provides fairness or accuracy in the administration of the death penalty with due process? That there have been no evidential failings or miscarriage or that the innocent have not been executed? I hope they will reflect upon this when 129 countries including about 19 Muslim countries and members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference have moratoriums in place. Does it make Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brunei Darussalam, Morocco or for that matter Tunisia and Turkey any less Islamic by not executing people?
I want to thank President Musharraf for sparing my life, but also earnestly implore him, the rest of the executive, the judiciary and the legislator to think about the rest.
There is no doubt in my mind that death penalty and deterrence have little to lend to each other. However, I am a supporter of the death penalty in extreme cases on the basis of retribution rather than deterrence. A man that kills dozens leaving behind families in tatters should be bound for the gallows and nothing else. This is in contrast to the use of the death penalty in most countries as a political tool to suppress political struggles [use against the Falun Gong by China is a prominent example]. Having said that the current criminal justice system of Pakistan does mean that most criminal convictions [death penalty and otherwise] are likely to be unsafe and therefore all death penalties should be suspended.
Hakim, the case of Mirza Tahir Hussain is not one that can be used to justify the abolition of death penalty. This is because his argument is (and has always been) that all the evidence against him was ‘circumstantial and fabricated’ which means that no sentence could have been justified.
Saad: There are two arguments that I put forward for the abolition of death penalty: Lack of deterrence and innocence of accused. I feel that Mirza Tahir Hussain’s case puts forward a very important argument for the abolition of death penalty. Obviously, that is with respect to Pakistan.
As you rightly pointed out the evidence against him was circumstantial and fabricated, however, he is not the only who has suffered such an injustice. What he says and what I agree with is that there are many other Mirza Tahir Hussain’s in Pakistan who are on death row against whom such evidence would have been produced. They are fighting their battle in an unjust system. And yes, I agree, that against such people no sentence is justified, but a life sentence is not as unammendable as an execution.
In the US alone since 1973, atleast 121 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. During the same period over 982 people have been executed. Thus, for every eight people executed, they found one person on death row who should never have been convicted. These statistics represent an intolerable risk of executing the innocent. If an automobile manufacturer operated with similar failure rates, it would be run out of business.
These facts pertain to the US, where the judicial process is arguably more reliable and less manipulated. Hence, what guarantee do we have that those on death row in Pakistan are, in fact, guilty of any crime? Unfortunately, once they are executed no new evidence proving otherwise can bring them back.
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree with you when it comes to unsafe convictions- that is why I argued for the suspension for all death penalties because as you rightly say a death penalty is not ammendable. However, my original point was that where there are extreme cases- for example, where there is evidence of a man having killed/raped dozens. To establish a dozen murders is a dozen times harder than establishing one murder and in such extreme cases where there is absolutely no doubt as to the person’s culpability the death penalty should not only be kept, but enforced.