Pakistan - Hang them all

Last year in June, the newly-elected Nawaz Sharif government scrapped the moratorium on executions as capital punishment, only to revive it next month under an unstated but widely believed threat of a bloody backlash by a terrorist outfit. But a year and half on, that bloody backlash has taken place and the same very outfit has claimed responsibility for the cold-blooded murder of 142 including 132 students of the Peshawar Army Public School - obliging the government to lift the moratorium. The legal position in Pakistan is that capital punishment is part of the law and courts do award death sentences to criminals found guilty of heinous crimes. But death sentences have not been carried out for the last eight years, except the one that was announced by a military court. What made the then PPP government to suspend executions in 2008 without amending the law accordingly there is no clear answer, but what held back the Nawaz Sharif government was said to be the European Union threat to withdraw GSP Plus status in case death penalty moratorium was lifted. Perhaps that too was a misunderstanding, now cleared by Commerce Minister Khurram Dastgir. According to him, lifting the ban on execution would not impact the GSP Plus concession, as "Pakistan has support of the European Union in the war against terror". One may not like to contest the merit of the EU perspective that 'there is no evidence that capital punishment is effective deterrence'. But for the present in Pakistan this is not only a legal compulsion to be complied with by the courts of law, but it is also warranted by the gravity of threat to public peace and order at the hands of terrorists. One would tend to think that the threat of terrorism is fast acquiring a global dimension, as the blood-seeking extremist outfits like Boko Haram, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Taliban spread their tentacles much beyond their bases. Pakistan is under no obligation, legal or ethical nor international not to carry out death sentences awarded by courts. It greatly appears that the lasting moratorium on executions may have suited a few idealist souls but it did play into the hands of the hardened criminals who kept baying for blood even from their prison cells. Were it logical to ask how will death penalty deter a wannabe there would not have been mercy petitions by hundreds of scores of convicted terrorists. Now that moratorium on executions has been lifted - courtesy the extreme sacrifice offered by scores of innocent schoolchildren in Peshawar - the concerned authorities should waste no time in sending the convicted terrorists to the gallows. The debates like good Taliban versus the bad Taliban and deterrence versus reformation as punishment are now behind us. Of course, the death row is long, with over eight thousands on it, and all of them are there after due process of law. But it is the convicted in terrorism-related cases that should go first for execution. People of Pakistan want the terrorists to be hanged, as simple as that.