BASHARAT PEER: The night of the Pakistani Taliban massacre of schoolchildren in Peshawar, the Pakistan Army bombed Northern Waziristan. The next day, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lifted the moratorium on executions, which has been in place since 2008, for terrorism-related cases. Within two weeks of the massacre, Pakistan had hanged seven convicted terrorists. Six had been convicted of participating in the attempted assassination of then President Pervez Musharraf in 2003; the seventh was on the death row for his involvement in an attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters in 2009. Media reports now put the figure of those executed as between eight and 10 persons. Last week, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the Interior Minister of Pakistan, announced at a press conference that Pakistan intends to hang about 500 prisoners convicted of terrorism-related offences within the next three weeks. Mr. Khan said that intelligence reports have predicted attempts at reprisals for the executions. “But we should not let our guard down if we want to avenge the victims of the Peshawar attack,” he said. […] The world might have never heard about Shafqat Hussain, had Pakistan not briefly lifted its moratorium on executions in August 2013. In the brief window before Pakistan reversed the decision, under pressure from the European Union, the names of convicts on the death row were made public. Sarah Belal and other lawyers at Justice Project Pakistan, a non-profit law firm in Lahore, took a particular interest in Hussain’s case. Belal and her colleagues interviewed Hussain on death row. He told them that the police burned him with cigarettes and administered electric shocks to his genitals until he confessed to the murder of Umair Memon. “When I met him in prison, I saw the burn marks on his arm, which he said were there from the time the police put out lit cigarettes on him during the interrogation,” Belal told me. The Justice Project also reviewed Hussain’s case files. They found that his state-appointed lawyer never asked that he be tried as a child offender and did not call a single witness in his defence. The anti-terrorism court ignored his statement that he had been tortured until he gave a confession and the Memon family’s statement that they did not recognise Hussain’s voice on the ransom calls. “The judge heard the calls himself and decided the voice was similar,” Ms. Belal said. The trial courts and appellate courts also disregarded Pakistan’s Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibit giving the death penalty to a person under 18 at the time of an alleged offense. More here.