The mirror Beirut held up to Pakistan

Lebanon abolished the death penalty. Now Pakistan must find the courage to follow.

I want to start with a man most people in Pakistan have never heard of.

His name is Junaid Hafeez. He came back from America — a Fulbright scholar — to teach literature at a university in Multan. American literature, photography, theatre. He was exactly the kind of person Pakistan is always saying it needs more of. In March 2013, some of his students accused him of posting something blasphemous on Facebook. He was arrested. His lawyer, a man named Rashid Rehman who was one of this country’s finest human rights advocates, was shot dead in his office in 2014 for agreeing to defend him. Junaid has been in solitary confinement since that same year. His appeal — more than a decade later — has still not been heard.

He has not been executed. I want to be clear about that. He is alive.

But I have been raising my voice on this cause long enough to know that what is being done to Junaid Hafeez is not life in any meaningful sense of the world and like Junaid there are more than 6000. It is something slower. And it is being done in the name of justice, in a country that has signed international treaties promising it will do better.

I thought about Junaid on the evening of 11 August, when news came through from Beirut.

Lebanon’s parliament voted that day to abolish the death penalty. Completely. The first country in the Middle East to do so — the first Arab country in history. A country that has been through civil war, political paralysis, an explosion that destroyed its capital, an economy in freefall. A country with every conceivable reason to say: we have bigger problems right now, this is not the moment.

They did it anyway.

Lebanon’s Justice Minister had actually spoken at the 9^th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris in June this year — I was in that room, representing Redemption Pakistan alongside more than 1,300 abolitionists from across the world. He stood at that podium and said his country was going to do this. And then they went home and they did it.

At first when I heard this statement from the politician at the podium I took it very lightly since politicians make such political statements as ours but in practical terms the implementation remains a question, but his delivered statement then proved me wrong today, for which I am proud of.

I have been working for this cause for years. I know better than to be easily moved. But I will be honest: sitting in Lahore and reading that news, I felt something between hope and fury. Hope because it happened. Fury because of how long Pakistan is taking to find the same courage.

What Pakistan is actually carrying

Our country accounts for roughly a quarter of the world’s entire death row population. One in every eight people executed anywhere on the planet is Pakistani. And here is the detail that should make every lawmaker in Islamabad stop cold: Pakistan’s own Supreme Court, reviewing these cases on appeal, has overturned approximately 85 percent of death sentences since 2014.

Eighty-five percent. That is not a system producing occasional error. That is a system in which wrongful sentencing is the norm.

People are being sent to death row by courts that are afraid — afraid of mobs outside, afraid of religious pressure inside, afraid of what happens to a judge who acquits someone accused of blasphemy. In that environment, the death sentence is not justice. It is the path of least resistance.

Over 4,500 people have been sentenced to death in Pakistan since 2004. Most of them poor. Many of them minorities. Some of them — we now know — innocent.

I find it very difficult to read those numbers without thinking about the families. The mothers who have been making prison visits for fifteen years. The children who have grown up with a parent behind bars, waiting. The wives who have held households together through years of uncertainty, with no clear answer about whether their husband will ever come home, or whether they will one day receive a different kind of notification entirely. Nobody writes about these families. They are not invited to speak at parliamentary committees. They are the people I think about when officials in Islamabad treat the death penalty as an abstract policy question.

The argument I keep hearing — and what Lebanon did to it

The case against reform goes something like this: Pakistan is not ready. Our society won’t accept it. The religious sentiment is too strong. The political cost is too high.

I have heard this for years. It is not entirely wrong — the political landscape is genuinely difficult. But Lebanon just made it a great deal harder to sustain.

Because Lebanon is a Muslim-majority country. And the Islamic legal tradition contains within it, if anyone cares to look, some of the most powerful arguments against the death penalty as it is currently practised. The shubuhat principle — that doubt must prevent the application of an irreversible punishment — is not a foreign concept imported from Geneva. It is classical Islamic jurisprudence. When 85 percent of death sentences are being overturned on appeal, the doubt is not hypothetical. It is documented. It is sitting in our own court records.

Redemption Pakistan has spent the past year building an Islamic Clerics Coalition — scholars who have engaged seriously with these questions from within their own tradition, not despite it. The conversations have been harder than I expected in some places, and more open than I expected in others. What I have found is that the theological door is not closed. It has just not been pushed.

Only one beautiful argument which is being presented by the Islamic Scholars is Surah Ash-Shura (Chapter 42), Verse 40 states that the retribution for an evil act is an equivalent punishment, but whoever pardons and makes reconciliation will receive their reward directly from Allah, as He does not like wrongdoers.

The economic argument nobody in government wants to say out loud

There is something else Pakistan needs to reckon with — and it is frankly more immediate than the moral argument, though the moral argument is the one that keeps me in this work.

Pakistan’s GSP+ status with the European Union is under serious pressure. This preferential trade arrangement covers roughly 28 percent of our total exports. We are talking about $7.5 billion in trade. We are talking about $730 million in tariff concessions. We are talking, ultimately, about the livelihoods of millions of Pakistani workers in textiles, manufacturing, and agriculture.

The EU’s revised GSP+ framework takes effect on 1 January 2027. The death penalty is explicitly listed among the human rights conditions Pakistan is required to address. A July 2026 EU assessment found us falling short. European ambassadors sat across a table from Pakistan’s Law Minister just last month and raised the death penalty moratorium directly.

When the ambassadors of Norway, France, the Netherlands, and Ireland are all in the same room asking the same question, Pakistan’s government would do well to provide a better answer than it has been giving.

I say this not as a threat. I say it as someone who wants this country to prosper — and who can see, with considerable frustration, that we are leaving economic and diplomatic capital on the table because we will not take a step that Lebanon, emerging from rubble, just managed to take.

What should actually happen — and not eventually

A formal moratorium. Not the informal, unwritten pause that has existed since 2019 and could be reversed tomorrow by a phone call. A declared, legally embedded moratorium on executions, passed through parliament, that protects every person on death row while longer-term reform is built. This is achievable. It does not require abolition. It does not require a referendum. It requires a decision.

A Death Row Review Commission. Independent, with authority. Comprising judges, lawyers, human rights experts, and religious scholars. Mandated to work through the backlog systematically — beginning with blasphemy convictions, juvenile offenders, people who were tortured into confessions, people whose lawyers were murdered or threatened into silence. The Supreme Court has already told us 85 percent of these sentences are wrong. Someone needs to act on that finding before more years disappear.

Remove the death penalty from blasphemy and non-violent offences. International law is not ambiguous: capital punishment is permissible, where it is retained at all, only for the most serious crimes involving intentional killing. A Facebook post does not meet that threshold. A theological disagreement does not. This change brings Pakistan into compliance with the ICCPR, which we have already signed and ratified. It is not capitulation to foreign pressure. It is honoring a commitment we made of our own accord.

Invest in restorative justice and rehabilitation. The death penalty persists partly because the criminal justice system has nothing else to offer — no credible framework for serving victims’ families, no serious rehabilitation program, no pathway out. Countries that have abolished the death penalty and invested in alternatives have consistently seen better outcomes for victims, communities, and the rule of law alike. We need to build those alternatives here, and we need to start now rather than after abolition, because building them is part of the argument for it.

Have an honest conversation about blasphemy law. I know this is sensitive. I am going to say it anyway. The blasphemy provisions are not protecting religion in Pakistan. They are protecting the people who weaponize religion — against minorities, against rivals, against anyone made vulnerable by an accusation that requires no evidence and carries no penalty for false reporting. The cost of this is being paid by Junaid Hafeez. It is being paid by the Christian families whose churches were burned in Jaranwala. It is being paid by the lawyers who cannot take certain cases because they have seen what happened to Rashid Rehman. At some point, a government that is serious about GSP+, about international credibility, about the kind of country it wants to be, has to say this.

— — —

Junaid Hafeez is still in his cell in Multan.

He went in as a young man who loved literature and theatre and had just come home from studying abroad. He is in his forties now. His lawyer was murdered. His appeal has not been heard. And somewhere in the system, his file sits — one among thousands — in a country that has signed treaties promising justice and has not yet found the will to deliver it.

Pakistan is not a country without conscience. We are not a country without scholars, without lawyers, without young people willing to fight for something better. I have met them. I work with them every day. The potential for this country to do right is real — I would not still be in this work if I did not believe that.

What we are short of is not capacity. What we are short of is the decision.

Lebanon made theirs on 11 August.

Pakistan’s moment is now.