12 July 2013 :

July 12, 2013 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 told The News when contacted. 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. 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 organizations have raised a hue and cry, demanding that nobody should be executed.