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Nearly 400 prisoners on death row, who are languishing in jails for the last several years due to non-decision about their fate by the presidency, will now either be sent to the gallows or face life terms or will be set free.
“We have decided to send all these cases to the presidency for decisions,” federal information minister and chief official spokesman senator Pervaiz Rashid said.
For years, all these cases are dumped at the interior ministry where they were sent by provincial home departments for decisions.
The ministry, under the previous government, had the instructions from the presidency not to forward to it any such case, a source said.
The result is, he said, that these convicts are living an extremely miserable life. Besides, the jails are crowded with death row prisoners, leaving no capacity for the new inmates, who get similar punishment from the courts, he said.
These inmates have filed mercy petitions to the president of Pakistan, who can either order their execution or can convert their conviction into life terms or can free them straightaway. He takes decisions on case to case basis.
The tormenting wait for final decisions about their fate has led them to constantly live a nightmarish life. They don’t know whether they will be hanged, or their sentences would be converted into life terms or they would be simply freed. The delay is nerve-shattering and bone-chilling for them.
Appeals of these convicts filed even in the Supreme Court were turned down since long. The mercy petitions, submitted by them after these rejections, are awaiting disposal, and the decisions have to be taken by the president.
The information minister said that the courts were rightly displeased with dragging foot on hanging the criminals, who have been sentenced and who have exhausted the right of
appeal long time ago.
Unnecessary criticism has been showered on courts by some elements that they don’t convict the criminals, he said, adding that if those sentenced were dealt with by the executive as per the law, the judicial forums would have no reservations.
He said that the prison authorities are also hard-pressed as they have to take special measures for those on death row. Those whose sentences are changed into life terms are kept with other prisoners under the law.
Under the constitution, the president has the powers to pardon, remit or reduce the sentence of anyone convicted by the courts. In the case of the inmates who have been imposed death penalty, President Asif Ali Zardari has consciously taken no decision for his own reasons, which have never been explained. The result is that such cases have piled up in the Interior Ministry unprecedented.
Pervaiz Rashid said that not a single case was sent to the president by the ministry over the last four years.
As the new government is determined to dispose of all the death row cases and send them to the president so that the inmates and their relatives are relieved of the immense ceaseless sufferings, some Pakistani and international human rights organisations have raised a hue and cry, demanding that nobody should be executed.
Way back in the nineties, the Presidency was packed to capacity with files awaiting decisions by General Ziaul Haq, who was not fond of the file work and would like to sit on cases as per his policy.
Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who took over as the interim President after Ziaul Haq died in a plane crash, cleared hundreds of files, taking decision on every one of them, even during his three-month stopgap incumbency.
Thus, the backlog was dispensed with after a long time. These cases included all sorts of matters, including the mercy petitions submitted by the death row inmates.