[Muhammad Iqbal was 17 when he was found guilty of a killing in his village in central Pakistan. The victim’s family later forgave him, which under Pakistani law is enough to resolve certain disputes, and appealed to a court that he not be hanged. That compromise was rejected because he had been charged with murder and convicted under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act.]
By Betsy Joles
Twenty-eight years passed before
Anwar was released from prison this spring. The once-healthy teen, now a
partially paralyzed man with severe heart problems, returned to a place he
barely remembered. Everything felt foreign. He made a list of places to visit,
including the house of his older brother, a teacher who died while Anwar was
behind bars.
He considers himself lucky, though.
A legal advocacy group took up his case and pursued repeated appeals. The
country’s Supreme Court ultimately commuted his sentence because of his age at
the time of the crime.
“Stopping the death warrant . . . was a big task,” Anwar recounted last month. “We
might not have managed to do it on our own.”
Until a gruesome Taliban
attack on a high school in December 2014, Pakistan had gone half a
dozen years with a de facto moratorium on capital punishment. Although the
government explicitly justified bringing it back to fight terrorism, officials
resumed executions for other capital offenses several months later.
More than 515 people have been
hanged since late 2014, with fewer than 90 of them tried as terrorists,
according to Justice Project Pakistan, the organization that managed to get
Anwar’s execution stayed. The country continues to have one of the world’s
largest death rows.
“It has led to a perversion of the
law,” said Sarah Belal, executive director of Justice Project Pakistan.
The same pattern has emerged in
sentencings, with researchers contending that the vast majority of crimes
resulting in death sentences have little connection to terrorism. Public
pushback has been minimal, despite the consequences.
Muhammad Iqbal was 17 when he was
found guilty of a killing in his village in central Pakistan. The victim’s
family later forgave him, which under Pakistani law is enough to resolve
certain disputes, and appealed to a court that he not be hanged. That
compromise was rejected because he had been charged with murder and convicted
under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act.
“It’s the tradition of our country
that we don’t catch the big crocodiles; it’s the small ones that they can
control,” Iqbal, now 40, said recently. “That’s how the system runs.”
What proved pivotal was his age
when the robbery-gone-bad occurred. A 2000 law had barred capital punishment
from being imposed on anyone younger than 18 at the time of an offense, and a
“presidential notification” the next year made the prohibition applicable to
individuals who were already incarcerated.
Like Anwar, Iqbal waited nearly two
decades for the judicial system to acknowledge the effect of those developments
on his case. His death sentence was finally commuted to life imprisonment in
2020; because he had already served the equivalent of a life term under
Pakistan’s penal code, he was released.
At the center of much of the
activity are Pakistan’s anti-terrorism courts, which were created in the late
1990s and intended to secure expedited trials and convictions through different
rules for custody, detention and bail. The law governing them defines a broad
target and includes threats that “create a sense of fear or insecurity in
society.”
Yet the issues in the nation’s
legal system go beyond those special tribunals, according to international
human rights groups. Nearly three dozen offenses are punishable today by death
in Pakistan, including blasphemy and
adultery, and other
courts rely heavily on eyewitness testimony and confessions that the
groups say are often obtained through coercion or torture.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Law and
Justice did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the country’s
renewed use of the death penalty.
Iqbal now says he confessed
to murder after being tortured during the police investigation. He was the only
person to receive a death sentence in the incident. Several others were
sentenced to 10 years.
In the past year, he has tried to
move on, relishing both big and little aspects of his days — the feeling of
freedom on a motorbike, the taste of watermelon. His nieces and nephews taught
him how to use a smartphone. He spends much of his time looking after his
family’s land, eight green and gold acres patchworked with wheat and sugar
cane. After years in a stuffy cell, he considers the dry landscape to be as
beautiful as the valleys of Kashmir
About 3,800 people are currently on
death row in Pakistan, down from nearly 4,700 in July 2019. In February,
the Supreme
Court blocked the use of the death penalty for mentally ill prisoners;
soon after, it commuted the sentences of two inmates with schizophrenia. It is
unclear how many juvenile offenders still face capital punishment, though one
estimate suggests it could be in the hundreds.
Outside forces could shrink death
row further. Pakistan is under continued pressure to meet international human
rights standards or risk its special trade status with the European Union. No
executions were carried out in 2020.
While the country has been criticized
internationally for retaining the death penalty — as have more
than four dozen other nations, including the United States — its limited
internal debate remains a problem, said criminal defense attorney Asad Jamal,
who has been involved in high-profile cases, including that of a university lecturer on
death row for blasphemy. “Lawyers are not talking about it. Judges are not open
to criticism.”
Without those conversations,
followed by key changes to anti-terrorism laws, Jamal and others worry the
courts will have incentives to hand out death penalties, especially during
times of violence or uncertainty.
“History does repeat itself,” Belal
noted in reference to the aftermath of the 2014 school attack in Peshawar.
“It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”
Anwar learned about the 2001
presidential order on juvenile offenders from a radio report on BBC Urdu that
he heard from his jail cell. As he recalled last month, his subsequent appeals
were dismissed despite judges telling him his case didn’t merit the death
penalty. He had been the only person convicted, although more than a dozen men
were involved in the argument-turned-fight. The victim died of his injuries
nearly a month later.
The government requires families to
cover the costs of food, basic necessities and even medical treatment for a
relative in prison, and Anwar’s paid around 25,000 rupees ($161) a month to
take care of him, according to his brother Sarwar. It was a steep price for a
large, rural family with limited means.
Anwar’s relatives welcomed him home
to Arifwala with handmade signs and home-cooked food. He has been passing the
time by playing chess on his cellphone — he learned the game in prison — and
fielding calls from former inmates and guards who became friends during his
many years of incarceration.
At 45, he walks slowly but
deliberately through his brother’s house and into the Punjab sun, using a field
hockey stick as a cane and his nephew’s shoulder for support. Anwar plans to
start working as an electrician, which he can do from home despite his limited
mobility. He has begun referring other death row inmates sentenced as juveniles
to human rights organizations that might take on their appeals.
He speaks with little resentment
about his experience. But the amount of time it took the system to resolve his
case, and how close he came to being executed, make him question whether the
final outcome can be called justice.
“If they had hung me,” he asks,
“then what could have been done?”
Read more
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killing of U.S. citizen prompts new criticism of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws
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Breaking
an old taboo, Pakistan begins to reckon with its powerful military
