Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS
Sunday, October 26, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Beena Sarwar

KARACHI, Oct 26 (IPS) – Zulfiqar Ali, 38, has been snatched from the gallows once again after Pakistan’s president agreed to give his relatives more time to negotiate clemency from the families of two persons shot dead during a violent dispute.

On Oct. 7, just hours before Ali’s scheduled execution, the president granted him a 14-day stay of execution. The stay, meant to allow time for negotiations for a compromise between the families, has now been extended to 60 more days.

Ali’s younger brother, Abdul Qayyum, said they initially needed more time because ”at first we did not even know where they lived”.

”We lost some time because of that. Now we need to proceed slowly. These things do not happen in a hurry. Those families have also suffered a loss and have to be handled delicately. We are hopeful that they will agree to a compromise, but I cannot say at this point what it will involve,” he told IPS.

Negotiations are being carried out through intermediaries.

”I do not want to get into whether my brother is guilty or not. I am only begging forgiveness for him on humanitarian grounds from the affected families, from the government, from God,” said Qayyum.

Ali, a former Pakistan navy physical training instructor, was arrested in 1998 for the death of two passers-by shot when he used his licensed revolver during a quarrel with a bus-driver. A district court sentenced him to death in April 1998. After all the appeals failed, he was issued with a ‘black warrant’ on Sep. 29 this year and his execution date was set for Oct. 8.

So far this year, Pakistan has executed 35 of its over 7,000 death row prisoners, according to I.A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

Two years ago, Ali’s wife died of cancer. His two daughters, 10 and 11, are now cared for by Qayyum, 31, who has four children of his own.

Under the controversial Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance 1990, commonly known as the Qisas and Diyat Law, enacted in the name of Islam, families of murder victims may accept compensation (‘diyat’) or insist on retribution (‘qisas’) from a convicted murderer.

Rights activists say this law enables those with resources to ”buy” their way out of punishment. Many, like HRCP co-chair Iqbal Haider, a former law minister, also believe that the law has no divine sanctity.

”It is a man-made law which is inherently unjust as it gives the rich a licence to kill,” said Haider who has lobbied hard behind the scenes with representatives of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to save Ali’s life on humanitarian grounds.

The Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission has also appealed to the Pakistan government for clemency on the grounds that Ali did not have adequate legal representation.

He was provided state-appointed lawyers at each stage of his trial, fulfilling the legal requirements. But state-appointed lawyers are poorly paid.

They also tend to be ”young and inexperienced or those without briefs — lawyers who should not be representing persons in death penalty cases,” the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a letter on Jun. 17. The letter urged Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani to commute all Pakistan’s death sentences to life imprisonment and abolish capital punishment.

Qayyum said that he had never ever met his brother’s lawyer appointed by the Supreme Court at the penultimate stage of appeal. In the final review stage, he had ”only spoken to the lawyer involved a couple of times on the phone”.

”Basically, they were just fulfilling formalities. He kept telling us that the [next] hearing dates had not been set, and then suddenly we were presented with the black warrant…. When I confronted him, he expressed total ignorance,” Qayyum said. ”I learnt from another lawyer that the Supreme Court had dismissed Zulfiqar’s final petition [against execution] because our lawyer was not present in court.”

Pakistani law provides no redress or remedy on the grounds of incompetent or ineffective legal representation, notes HRW.

Condemned prisoners are now clinging to the hope that Pakistan will issue a general amnesty for all those on death row.

On Jun. 21, Gilani told parliament that the death sentences would be commuted in honour of the memory of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, assassinated during a PPP election rally last December.

But the law ministry has still not finalised the details of the amnesty. Since the June announcement, 15 people have been executed, said Rehman. HRCP’s Iqbal Haider said the delay in carrying through the commutation promise was due to law minister Farooq Naek.

”The government wants it, but the law minister has given an adverse opinion because he is scared of the religious forces,” Haider told IPS. ”He has created complications by saying that death sentences cannot be commuted to life because of the qisas and diyat law.”

The electorate roundly rejected the religious parties in the general elections on Feb. 18. These parties, known for their displays of street power, form the main opposition to a moratorium on executions and the proposal to commute death sentences.

Haider said the powerful law minister could insist that ”Article 45 of the Constitution, which gives the president the power to grant a reprieve or pardon to a condemned prisoner, overrides qisas and diyat which is a man-made law with no divine sanction.”

PPP spokesman and former member of the Senate human rights committee, Farhatullah Babar, said that the death penalty ”should not be carried out in any case as it is irreversible”. He was hopeful that the country’s death sentences would be soon commuted.

Until the government fulfils its promise to commute death sentences to life imprisonment, the only hope for condemned prisoners like Zulfiqar Ali lies in clemency from the families of the deceased — and temporary presidential reprieves to buy them enough time to negotiate these.