Commenting, Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at the human rights organisation Reprieve, said: “It is outrageous that the authorities are pushing ahead with their plans to hang Basit, and that the courts are now accepting the government’s argument that Pakistan’s worldwide obligations can be openly flouted”.
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The government’s failure to acknowledge this and commute Basit’s sentence appeared to form part of a worrying trend involving the blanket dismissal of all mercy petitions considered since executions resumed in 2014, he had said before the court.
A MAN IS due to be executed in Pakistan tomorrow after being convicted of murder six years ago, although he has always maintained his innocence.
HRCP urges President Mamoon Husain to stay the execution of Abdul Basit and grant him reprieve.
“This case has once again drawn widespread attention to the cruelty of the relentless conveyer belt of executions in Pakistan”, said the statement from Amnesty global .
Basit, who uses a wheelchair, has been paralyzed since contracting tubercular meningitis in 2010 while in the central jail in Faisalabad, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Earlier, the Supreme Court had dismissed his appeal wherein he pleaded that executing him would be cruel and peculiar.
The family of a paraplegic death row prisoner in Pakistan have begged the authorities to cancel plans to execute him on 22 September.
“The execution of Abdul Basit, a paraplegic, would constitute a cruel and peculiar punishment, violating not only the fundamental right to human dignity enshrined in our Constitution, but also Islamic jurisprudence as well as global treaties that Pakistan has ratified under the GSP plus status”, Bilal said. “The Pakistani government should strengthen its justice system rather than sending more people like Abdul Basit to the gallows”.
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On December 17, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif rescinded a four-year unofficial moratorium on capital punishment in apparent response to the December 16 attack by the Pakistani Taliban splinter group Tehreek-e-Taliban on a school in Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan that left at least 148 dead – nearly all of them children. The worldwide community must call on Pakistan to respect global law and halt this execution without delay.
