ISLAMABAD: There was a need to have a wider public debate on death penalty engaging all sections of the society, said Pakistan People’s Party Senator Farhatullah Babar at a demonstration organized by Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in Islamabad on the 15th World Day Against the Death Penalty. He said that even if it was not possible to abolish death penalty to begin with, what could be done was to ensure basic legal guarantees in cases of death penalty. Regardless of one’s opinion, there could be no disagreement on presumption to innocence until proven guilty, the right to proper legal defence and declaring confessions extracted through torture as illegal, he said. Some jurists had proposed a time gap between conviction and pronouncement of sentence as a safeguard against hasty death penalty, he said. He said that there were laws with locus in Islam that could not be changed. However, as opposed to only two crimes that carried death penalty in Islam, there were 27 crimes that carried death penalty in Pakistan. He said that death penalty in Pakistan was almost abolished for the rich and the privileged because of the misapplication of Qisas and Diyat. We ought to know how many of the hundreds executed during the past three years were terrorists and how many ordinary criminals, he said. Let us not to hang a minor and a mentally sick at least, the senator said. Let us not send someone to gallows even before an appeal is decided, as happened last year in the case of two brothers, he said.
Published in Daily Times, October 11th 2017.
