ISLAMABAD: PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar has called for a wide ranging national debate on the awarding of the death penalty in a broken justice system and with the law heavily tilted in favour of the rich and powerful.

Addressing a seminar on `Trial and Terror` hosted by the Justice Project of Pakistan for the launching of a report, the senator said terrorists are not deterred by the death penalty and that the rich and powerful manipulate Qisas laws to get away with murder, meaning only the poor are hanged.

Three years since the lifting of the moratorium on executions, it is time to make an assessment of thenet result of the application of antiterror laws, military courts, the Regulation in Aid of Civil Power and Guantanamo Bay type prisons for fighting terrorism, he said.

The senator added that nearly 500 people have been executed during the last three years of whom 80pc were ordinary criminals and not terrorists, as promised at the time of military courts.

Mr Babar said that in a security driven state, welfare and the rights of people matter little. The rush to carry out executions is a reaffirmation of the truth that a state does not care about people`s lives and is least concerned about how they die, he said.

`Two brothers were recently acquitted of murder by the Supreme Court after 15 years on death row but only after they had already been executed and no one in the criminal justice chain knowing about it,` he said.

The senator asked scholars how they would rationalise such a gross miscarriage of justice with the insistence that a moratorium on executions was against the religion.

He said Islam calls for the death penalty on only two offences but 27offences are punishable by death in Pakistan.

There is no reason for not revisiting the offences which carry the death penalty, he argued.

The senator said the implementation of Actions (in aid of civil administration) Regulation 2011 is another worrisome area.

The regulation was given a back dated effect from 2008 to enable security agencies to conduct an open trial of those who had been in their custody for years in the Provincially Administered Tribal Areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

However, no one knows how many internment centres have been set up for keeping them today, how many inmates are in these centres and what their charges are, how many have died in these centres and whether and how many are being tried for what crimes and in which courts.

These internment centres have become little Guantanamo Bay prisons, black holes for the inmates and no-go areas even for the judiciary and the parliament, he said.

National Commission on Human Rights Chairman retired JusticeAli Nawaz Chowhan said the criminal justice system in Pakistan is a poor system which needs substantialreform.

`The courts alone cannot bear all the responsibility for the prosecution of cases, there are problems with the police, which impede quick justice. I have always suggested the moratorium and have intervened in executions,` he said.

Former senator Afrasiab Khattak said Pakistan`s law against terrorism actually has an under reach when it comes to trying and convicting terrorists.

`The law is grossly misused, despite originally being aimed at convicting jet black terrorists,` he said.

MNA Shazia Marri said the state has been trying to sella specific narrative on terrorism and terror-phobia.

According to Trial and Error, of the 480 prisoners executed from Dec 2014 to Oct 2017, 76 were executed by the Anti-Terrorism Courts.

However, two out of every three of these executions were for crimes that had no nexus to terrorism.