From the lower judiciary to the superior courts, all have rejected pleas that Shafqat Hussain was a juvenile when he kidnapped and murdered a seven-year-old boy. Why do you and your organisation still insist that Hussain was a child when the crime was committed? Why would the entire system conspire to send Hussain to the gallows?

Firstly, I want to note that Shafqat’s conviction — which is extremely unsound — is for kidnapping and accidental killing, and not for murder.

But to answer your main question: No plea relating to Shafqat’s age was ever taken before the lower judiciary, due to the incompetence of the lawyers representing him and Shafqat’s own ignorance of the law. The issue was first raised before the Supreme Court in a review petition filed in 2007. The Supreme Court did not make a determination of fact on the issue of juvenility, but instead dismissed the petition without consideration on purely procedural grounds.

Currently, there is no clear mechanism for the courts to consider new evidence or arguments after all ordinary appeals have concluded in death penalty cases. This is true not only where the evidence relates to issues like juvenility, but also where there is evidence relating to numerous other issues, including innocence.

The only thing approaching an age assessment to date has been the FIA inquiry, which consistently dismissed or ignored evidence in support of his juvenility and covered up a wide range of key evidence relating to Shafqat’s age, and has been called “prima facie illegal” by the Islamabad High Court. It’s also worth noting that although Chaudhry Nisar has claimed that, “The inquiry that I have conducted was to verify [the] claim of age,” there are two different reports from the FIA (one provided to the media and one to Shafqat’s lawyers) which nonetheless both state that: “The objective of the enquiry is not to determine the age of Shafqat Hussain.”

It is my job as a lawyer to represent my client’s interests to the best of my ability and to explore all available avenues to do so. No human system is infallible and I believe that we should have mechanisms within our legal system that recognise this and allow for new evidence to be given full consideration where there is a risk of a serious miscarriage of justice, as there are in the vast majority of other common law jurisdictions.

The Justice Project has alleged that Hussain confessed to the crime because of torture. Why do you fail to take into account the fact that he was caught red-handed when he came to collect the ransom money and it was on his information that the body of the victim was found?

Shafqat was not caught red-handed while collecting the ransom money — not even the prosecution has alleged this, as is confirmed by the trial court documents. He was arrested from his residential quarters at Nafees Plaza over 42 days after Umair went missing. The statements of all the prosecution witnesses and the trial court judgment confirm this.

Police torture is widespread in Pakistan — as many police officers will readily admit. Although the Criminal Procedure Code and the Evidence Act both contain safeguards to prevent evidence that is not independently verified from being used in court, the police have developed a number of notorious tactics to get around these provisions.

Shafqat has consistently raised the fact that he was tortured into giving a false ‘confession,’ something which is corroborated by the scars still on his body and a medical report from Dr Frank Arnold, an internationally respected expert in this field. Despite the fact that the issue of torture has been repeatedly raised in this case it has never been properly investigated, meaning that Pakistan is in breach of our international obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and providing yet another reason that Shafqat’s execution would violate international law were it to go ahead.

There have been allegations that some NGO workers, in their zeal to protect Hussain’s life, circulated his childhood photograph rather than the one when he was arrested. They also forged documents to show he is underage.

The two pictures of a teenaged Shafqat on JPP’s website are the last pictures his family had of him before he left for Karachi. We, as his lawyers, were never provided with photos from the time of his arrest.

It is utterly false to suggest any documents were ‘forged’ by NGOs. All the documents which we have referred to were issued by official government bodies. The real question is why the Pakistan government has seized, and is refusing to release, Shafqat’s school records, which may hold clear evidence that he was a juvenile when arrested.

Do you feel that you pleaded a wrong case and created an unnecessary controversy?

No. As I said earlier, the government continues to withhold key evidence, which could prove that Shafqat was a juvenile when arrested, notably his school record. They have also consistently refused to investigate the torture he was subjected to in order to force him to make a false ‘confession.’ We would stress that Shafqat is just one of many cases of injustice — hundreds, if not thousands of other Pakistanis have been tortured by the police, or convicted as children. A figure quoted by the respected NGO, Ansar Burney Trust, finds that almost 60 per cent of people facing the death penalty in Pakistan are actually innocent. We need a calm, reasonable debate about these issues in order to ensure we are not sending the innocent to the hangman’s noose.

Many quarters in Pakistan say that Hussain’s case is an attempt to undermine the entire judicial system of Pakistan. Your comment?

Our aim in working on this case and others is to strengthen both the judicial system and the rule of law in Pakistan, by ensuring everyone has access to a proper defence. Our legal system — just like every other system in the world — is not perfect, which means that miscarriages of justice can and do happen. It is my job as a lawyer to work within that system to ensure that where mistakes are made, they are addressed, so that in future, such miscarriages of justice can be avoided. The greatness of Pakistan’s common law legal system is its ability to adapt and change to ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to protect the fundamental rights enshrined in the very first chapter of the constitution — that is what we are seeking to uphold and to strengthen.

Why is there an impression that many of our NGOs are more concerned with the rights of terrorists, killers and child abusers rather than those of victims and their families?

We, of course, have huge sympathy for the victims of terrorism and other serious crimes. We agree that those who commit such crimes need to be brought to justice. However, we believe that it serves no one if innocent people are hanged for crimes they did not commit. As long as police torture is tolerated in Pakistan, this will be not just a risk but a certainty. At present, the flaws in our system mean that the poor and the vulnerable are often wrongly accused and convicted, while the real perpetrators roam free.