Daily Times

Imran Ali — who was already on death row for the rape and murder of six-year old Zainab Amin — was handed the death penalty on 12 more counts for the rape and murder of three other girls this past Saturday. Considering that on July 31, a seven-year old girl was raped and murdered in Karachi’s Bhittaiabad area, it is necessary that the people of this country remember they had demanded the death penalty for Imran Ali so that sexual predators would be deterred from such heinous crimes in the future. As the Bhittaiabad incident and numerous others like it have shown, sexual assaults on children have remained a problem and any amount of death sentences handed down to Imran Ali or any other criminal won’t change this.

The moratorium on death penalty in Pakistan was lifted in December 2014 in response to the Army Public School (APS) Massacre. It was said that when terrorists are handed out death penalty, others would be deterred from committing acts of violence. It is interesting to note that it was attacks on children that prompted Pakistanis to demand the death penalty on mainstream and social media after both the APS incident and the Zainab rape-murder case. However, as numerous incidents of terrorism since December 2014 have shown, death penalty has not proved to be much of a deterrent for violent jihadis. Recently they tried to derail the country’s whole political system through a series of attacks on politicians and election candidates. In fact, as the response to the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri and rise of Barelvi extremism have shown, executing terrorists can cause entire extremist political ideologies to emerge around perceived ‘martyrs’.

As such, Pakistani citizens and relevant authorities must ask themselves why the state continues to engage in a practice that  proven to be ineffectual, in addition to damaging our already unflattering human rights record. The federal government introduced the moratorium on the death penalty in 2008 because of international pressure and reinstating this penalty in 2014 was in violation of our international obligations.

The relevant authorities must address the root causes of heinous and violent crimes like terrorism and child rape. The death penalty accomplishes little to make this country safer.  *

Published in Daily Times, August 6^th 2018.