[Deathpenalty] [POSSIBLE SPAM] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

July 22


PAKISTAN:

Pakistan and the Death Penalty: Time to Call it Quits


It was painful to think of Rehmat Shah Afridi on death row, haggard and
ill.

I had worked with him at the English language daily paper he launched from
Lahore in 1989, The Frontier Post, originally started from Peshawar,
capital of his native North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in the
mid-1980s. He was not highly educated but he had a liberal, progressive
vision of independent media and had brought one of the countrys finest
journalists, Aziz Siddiqui, on board as the editor.

'Shah Sahib,' as everyone respectfully and affectionately called Afridi,
was a smiling, pleasant man in his early forties, immaculately dressed in
crisp white shalwar kameez, the attire of baggy trousers and long tunic
that is widely worn all over Pakistan. At the make-shift offices of The
Frontier Post above a car repair workshop in Lahore's bustling city
centre, he was a genial, down-to-earth presence into whose office anyone,
from a lowly guard to a young reporter, could enter without an appointment
and be offered a cup of tea  part of the egalitarian tribal code alien to
class-conscious urban Pakistan. Shah Sahib countered rumors about his
involvement in 'drug smuggling' by pointing out that his clan, the Afridi
tribe, was legally engaged in cross-border trade with Afghanistan as part
of an old agreement with the former British colonizers.

Aziz Siddiqui had by then joined the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
(HRCP) as co-director along with his close friend and fellow journalist
I.A. Rehman who was Director of HRCP. The organization was among those
that protested Afridi's arrest in 1999 on what most journalists believe to
be trumped up charges of drug trafficking. After a district court on June
27, 2001 condemned Afridi to death by hanging, he spent the next 3 years
on death row. There was sporadic news of him once he was convicted. One of
his lawyers told me that he was terribly ill at one point and had lost
much weight. The Lahore High Court on June 3, 2004 commuted his death
sentence on the grounds that trafficking in hashish is not a capital
crime. Still, he remained in Lahore's notorious Kot Lakhpat Jail for
nearly a decade, with courts periodically turning down his bail
applications, pleas to move him to a prison in Peshawar closer to his
family and appeals for proper medical care. He was finally released on
bail in May this year.

Afridi's case symbolizes a larger issue: the regular travesties of the
justice system in Pakistan. He had the resources to hire well known,
competent lawyers who got his death sentence converted to life
imprisonment although even they could not manage to get him paroled or
acquitted. Most of the 95,000 detainees crammed into Pakistan's
over-crowded prisons have no such resources. Only about a third - 31,400
or so - have been convicted. A staggeringly large number of convicts are
on death row - over 7,000, including almost 40 women.

Death row inmates "are either involved in lengthy appeals processes or
awaiting execution after all appeals have been exhausted," noted the New
York-based Human Rights Watch in a letter to the Pakistani prime minister
on June 18th of this year. Appeals typically linger on for at least a
decade, more often 2. The letter urged Pakistan to abolish the death
penalty and until then, to at least sign a UN moratorium on any further
executions. "The number of persons sentenced to death in Pakistan and
executed every year is among the highest in the world, with a sharp
increase in executions in recent years" (134 in 2007, up from 82 in 2006,
52 in 2005, and 15 in 2004).

Afridi's arrest in Lahore on the night of April 1, 1999 seemed like a bad
joke. He was held without charge, beaten and tortured. Nothing surprising
about that  in the absence of proper forensic equipment and training, most
police cases rely on witness testimonies and confessions routinely
obtained through torture and intimidation, as the HRCP documents in its
monitoring reports every year.

The prime minister at the time of Afridi's arrest was Nawaz Sharif of whom
The Frontier Post and its sister Urdu language publication the daily
Maidan had been bitingly critical. The Sharif regime did not have a good
track record with the media. They had earlier tried to squeeze the Jang
group of newspapers (where I then worked), and prior to that, arrested
Najam Sethi, Editor of weekly The Friday Times for making an 'unpatriotic'
speech in 'enemy territory' (India). Sharif and his henchman, the
all-powerful Saifur Rehman - through whom these actions were taken, backed
down from both cases only after journalists in Pakistan created a major
uproar, which was also taken up internationally.

The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) had also protested
Afridi's arrest and held public demonstrations for his release.
International organizations like the Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF),
Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also
took up Afridi's case and appealed to the government for his release.
"However, once he was convicted there was little we could have done,"
reflected Mazhar Abbas, General Secretary of the PFUJ when I asked him why
there wasn't more public outrage about the case. He added that the
newspaper editors' and owners' bodies had "backed out of a joint struggle
because of professional rivalries, since The Frontier Post had the
potential to challenge some of their publications. Otherwise, he would
have been out of prison much earlier."

After army chief General Pervez Musharraf overthrew Sharif in a military
coup of October 1999, there were hopes that Afridi would soon be freed.
However, there were powerful forces ranged against him, including the
Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) officers who had arrested him (against whom his
papers had written for their involvement in drug trafficking). It was not
until after a civilian government came to power following the general
elections of February 2008 that the provincial interior ministry ordered
Afridi to be released on parole on May 24th, on the grounds of good
behavior.

Faisal Siddiqi, a young advocate at the Sindh High Court in Karachi who
often takes on pro bono cases, told me that those who are awarded capital
punishment are usually "the poorest of the poor." Most of them are
illiterate and have no resources or support. Along with the HRCP's Javed
Burki, a grizzled older advocate, Faisal tries to help condemned prisoners
in Karachi Central Prison. In death penalty cases, the absence of an
effective private counsel appears to be the difference between whether the
death penalty is confirmed or set aside. Prisoners are condemned 'not for
the worst crime but for the worst lawyer,'" he says, quoting a 1994 Yale
Law Review study.

"Poor people lack access to competent counsel at both the trial and
appellate stages," according to Human Rights Watch. "According to one
study conducted in 2002, 71 % of condemned prisoners in the North West
Frontier Province were uneducated and over half (51 %) had a monthly
income below Rs 4,000 ($50 USD). The average fee for an appeal to the High
Court in murder cases is around Rs 60,000 (about $900 USD). This creates
an unequal system of justice, in which those with financial or political
resources are able to obtain better legal services and avoid the death
penalty."

Sometimes, they don't even get a lawyer. In one recent case, an illiterate
army janitor called Zahid Masih was hanged in Peshawar Central Jail after
a court martial, having been denied a civilian legal counsel, noted Human
Rights Watch in its letter. 3 days later, the government announced (on the
occasion of the late former Prime Minister Benazir Bhuttos birthday, June
21, 2008) that it was proposing to commute all death sentences to life
imprisonment except for terrorists and those convicted of attempting to
assassinate President Pervez Musharraf.

The federal cabinet approved the proposal on July 2nd. However, the
Supreme Court of Pakistan has since taken suo moto notice of the proposal,
perhaps in response to opposition from the right-wing lobby which argues
that the move would go against the Constitution of Pakistan as well as the
teachings of Islam. Until the matter is decided, the only ray of hope for
Pakistans condemned prisoners is the Prime Ministers proposed commutation.

Post-script: Rahat Dar, a photographer friend from The Frontier Post days
emailed me a photograph of Shah Sahib on his release, garlanded with
flowers, beaming, hugging his sons. He has said that he will apply for a
re-trial in order to establish his innocence. "I was arrested after my
paper published a report that the then director-general of the
Anti-Narcotics Force and some army officers were involved in drug
smuggling," he told journalists after his release. "I am not ashamed of my
imprisonment as all the charges brought against me are false."

About the Author

Beena Sarwar is a journalist, writer, documentary filmmaker and artist
based in Karachi, Pakistan. She started out as assistant editor for The
Star Weekend, joined The Frontier Post as Features Editor, was Editor of
weekly The News on Sunday, a weekly paper that she launched in Pakistan
for The News International and has worked as an OpEd Editor for The News
International. She has a Masters in Television Documentary (Goldsmiths
College, University of London, 2001) and was a news and features producer
at Geo TV before going to Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow (2005-06)
and a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (2006-07).

Beena freelances for various publications in Pakistan and abroad,
including InterPress Service, and is on the editorial board for monthly
Himal Southasian, Kathmandu. Her volunteer work and activism includes
involvement with the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the
War Against Rape and the Women's Action Forum as well as the
Pakistan-India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy.

(source: The Women's International Perspective)