Pakistan court blocks execution of two inmates with mental illness

Supreme Court orders Kanizan Bibi and Imdad Ali to be transferred to a mental health facility and asks for the case of Ghulam Abbas, a third inmate facing execution, to be reviewed in a landmark judgment hailed by rights groups.

Some 518 people have been executed in Pakistan since 2014 when the government lifted a moratorium on capital punishment, and 4,225 people are on death row.
AFP Archive

Some 518 people have been executed in Pakistan since 2014 when the government lifted a moratorium on capital punishment, and 4,225 people are on death row.

Pakistan's Supreme Court has commuted death sentences for two mentally ill people and sent them to health facilities and it directed the government to seek a pardon for a third mentally ill person on death row.

The ruling reverses a 2016 decision in which the court sentenced to death a man, Imdad Ali, suffering from schizophrenia. That sentence was never carried out and Ali was one of the two who had their sentence commuted on Wednesday.

The other person to have their sentence commuted was Kanizan Bibi, who spent 30 years on death row for killing six people when she was a teenager.

In their ruling, the judges said she should be moved to a mental health facility and treated for her illness.

"We hold that if a condemned prisoner, due to mental illness, is found to be unable to comprehend the rationale and reason behind his/her punishment, then carrying out the death sentence will not meet the ends of justice," said Pakistan's Supreme Court in its ruling.

'Historic judgment' 

Human rights groups welcomed Wednesday's ruling.

"This is a historic judgment that validates our decade-long struggle to get the courts to recognise mental illness as a mitigating circumstance," Sarah Belal, founder and executive director of Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) told Reuters news agency.

"We hope the guidelines ... will permeate to all levels of the judiciary and prison staff so that mental illnesses can be detected and treated instead of being ignored and denied," said Ali Haider Habib, spokesperson for the JPP, a legal nonprofit organisation representing the three inmates.

Ali was sentenced to death for the murder of a religious cleric in 2002 but diagnosed with schizophrenia while in prison in 2012.

In a 2016 ruling, the Supreme Court said schizophrenia was "not a permanent mental disorder," and his execution could go ahead despite an outcry from human rights groups.

Pardon for third man

A cousin of Bibi's, Munawar Hussain, 28, welcomed the ruling saying she was only 15 or 16 when she was arrested and had been subjected to abuse.

The judges said the government should seek a pardon for a third man, Ghulam Abbas, who was convicted of murder in 2006.

Thousands on death row 

Some 518 people have been executed in Pakistan since 2014 when the government lifted a moratorium on capital punishment, and 4,225 people are on death row.

The ban was lifted after the Army Public School massacre by the Taliban in Peshawar in 2014 that killed 151 people, mostly students.

Hangings were initially reinstated only for those convicted of terrorism but later extended to all capital offences.

Since then the country has hanged more than 500 prisoners, many linked to militancy.

The list of crimes punishable by death in Pakistan is long – taking in dozens of offences including blasphemy, adultery, drug trafficking, and even "sabotage of the railroad."

Last year Pakistan's Parliament passed a resolution calling for the public hanging of convicted child killers and rapists.

In the latest order, the apex court, however, said that not every mental illness shall automatically qualify for an exemption from carrying out the death sentence.

"This exemption will be applicable only in that case where a medical board, consisting of mental health professionals, certifies after a thorough examination and evaluation that the condemned prisoner no longer has higher mental functions to appreciate the rationale behind the sentence of death awarded to them," the judgment, cited by Dawn news website read. 

Route 6