Lahore High Court stops execution of schizophrenic prisoner
Khizar Hayat was convicted in 2003 for killing a fellow policeman. The court, the ruling on another inmate, who was also suffering from schizophrenia, for which the Supreme Court stayed the execution. Since December 2014, 427 executions have been carried out.
Lahore (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The Lahore High Court has suspended the execution of a prisoner suffering from schizophrenia, due next week. Khizar Hayat, 55, and former police officer, was convicted in 2003 for killing another policeman his colleague. Now the highest court in Punjab has asked the government to carry out further analysis on the health of the prisoner, and to provide its ruling no later than January 30.
Iqbal Bano, mother of former agent, said: "My son needs medical attention, not execution." The woman appealed to Mamnoon Hussain, the Pakistani president, pleading to forgive her son. She visited him in prison and adds that the convict "is not in a stable mind”.
The Justice Project Pakistan (Jpp) activist group reports that the Court has decided to stop the implementation of the death sentence pending the Supreme Court of Pakistan judgment that is due to issue the verdict on another condemned to death, Imdad Ali who also suffers from schizophrenia. Last year the judges of the supreme court had suspended the execution and appointed a group of experts to assess his mental health.
According to activists, in May 2016 Hayat was declared to be suffering from psychosis and manic depression. Since the ruling that sentenced him to death was issued, he was a victim of several attacks by fellow convicts and from 2012 has been in solitary confinement.
Wassam Waheed, spokesman for the activist group, says that the case of Hayat demonstrates "a complete lack of safeguards for mentally ill prisoners. Until the Supreme Court defines the method by which they must be treated before the law, we will continue to fill our death rows with people like Imdad and Khizar ".
Pakistan is a signatory of international conventions banning executions for the mentally ill. In December 2014, the Islamabad authorities suspended the moratorium on capital punishment for crimes related to terrorism following the attack carried out by the Taliban against a military school in Peshawar, which killed about 150 people mostly children. Later in May 2015 it reintroduced execution for all crimes.
Data compiled by the group Reprieve shows that since the lifting of the moratorium, which the country respected for seven years, 427 convictions were carried out. These numbers make Pakistan the third largest country in the world for executions, after Iran and China for which there is no official data.
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