PAKISTAN: RISING EXECUTION RATE WORRIES RIGHTS ACTIVIST

I.A. Rehman, director of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, commented on Pakistan’s 61 percent increase in executions in 2007. “The spurt in executions is due to a number of reasons, but mainly the brutalization of state and society. Also responsible has been the bar to pardons and remissions caused by the 1990 Qisas and Diyat Ordinance [on retribution and blood money], the government's increasing despair at the burgeoning death row population and its cost, and lastly, the high number of offences for which death penalty is prescribed.” He noted that conditions on death row were horrendous, but better than in the past, and no worse than elsewhere in the prisons. He believes that Pakistan “is a victim of the belief that Islam provides for mandatory death penalty and thus this cruel practice cannot be done away with.”