ISLAMABAD: The German Embassy hosted a screening of a 15-minute film, 17 and Sentenced to Die, which is based on the case of Mohammad Iqbal who was convicted of killing a man in an armed robbery when he was 17 and has been on death row for 20 years in Pakistan. A panel discussion on the death penalty followed.

The film was screened as part of the Human Rights though Cinematography series which will culminate on Dec 10, which is International Day of Human Rights.

The film follows Sohail Yafat a criminal defence investigator with the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), as he tracks down the main figures in Iqbal’s case.

The short interviews highlight the problematic nature of the process followed, the inadequate defence and the systemic flaws in the system that allowed a 17-year-old to slip through the cracks.

Sohail Yafat says in the film that if Iqbal had a competent lawyer right at the beginning, a case for a forceful confession could have been made. At 17, he was tortured for the confession.

Then the ossification tests showed that he was in fact underage at the time of occurrence of the crime. It is the job of the defence counsel to bring the torture before the court but the lawyer behaved as if this was a matter of course.

He also speaks to the apparent witnesses who state that they were also coerced and there were contradictions in their statements.

The investigator went to the crime scene to ascertain whether it was even possible to identify somebody at a distance of 70 yards in the dark and determines that it would be near impossible.

Waheed, the victim’s son, is willing to forgive Iqbal and has submitted a request for a stay on the execution but Iqbal was convicted by the Anti-Terrorism Court, the sentence of which is non-negotiable.

Sarah Belal, a prominent Pakistani human rights lawyer and founder of JPP, said: “you can see the systemic problems highlighted in the film by all the stakeholders.

You see the lawyer talking about the prevalence of torture where the defence lawyers don’t even feel the need to bring it on record because it is so commonplace; you see confusion about what sort of evidence should be admissible with regards to age – should it be medical tests or school certificates or the discretion of the judges”.

She added: “The biggest indictment of Pakistan’s wrongful convictions comes from the Supreme Court where in the past years a single bench of the Supreme Court has overturned 85pc of the criminal appeals of death sentences that came before it based on exactly the systemic problems we see in this documentary: false testimonies, inadequate evidence, et cetera.”

German Ambassador Martin Kobler said: “The question of the death penalty is a matter of the social contract in every society. My own country came out of a dictatorship where the death penalty was used and above all misused.

This is the German experience that if you have an uncontrolled government there is no accountability and things like the death penalty are misused.

Therefore after the war, the first article of the German Constitution is that human dignity is untouchable – and this is unchangeable. This is our social contract after the atrocities of the Second World War.”

Pakistan up until two years ago had the largest reported death row in the world at 8,000 people; currently this stands at 4,688 and this is the second largest death row.

Every 8th person executed in the world is a Pakistani, every 7th person sentenced to death is a Pakistani. The Pakistani death row makes up 26pc of the world’s death row.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2018