Collaboration with Lowenstein Clinic Proves “Critical” to Justice Project Pakistan

In 2014, the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a nonprofit human rights law firm based in Lahore, published a report documenting the routine abuse of detainees and suspects by the police force in Faisalabad, Pakistan. The project marked the beginning of a longstanding collaboration between the Schell Center and JPP that has led to the public revelation of further human rights abuses. The partnership, as emphasized by Zainab Malik, JPP’s Advocacy and Policy Manager, has been “critical” to JPP’s advocacy strategy on the domestic and international level.

JPP focuses its advocacy efforts on human rights organizations and treaty bodies, the Pakistani legislature, and the Pakistani public. According to Amber Qureshi ’19, a former Kirby Simon summer fellow at JPP, the Clinic has played a particularly important role in assisting JPP’s international advocacy.

After the May 2014 report on the Faisalabad Police’s routine abuse of detainees and suspects, the Clinic wrote two follow-up reports — one on the abuse of juveniles and another on the abuse of women by the Faisalabad Police. Qureshi argued that these reports “granted the organization a certain level of legitimacy in the eyes of international actors and funders of the organization.” Most recently, she said, JPP published a report with Human Rights Watch on Pakistanis imprisoned in Saudi Arabia –– an opportunity Qureshi said the organization might not have had without its collaboration with the Clinic.

Malik said that the Clinic’s reports were essential to JPP’s advocacy around the Universal Periodic Review of Pakistan in November 2017, when JPP pushed for recommendations regarding the death penalty from member states. The reports’ data helped JPP formulate their recommendations and make them more specific. “Recommendations that are specific in nature are powerful advocacy tools as they have a higher chance of being accepted and implemented,” Malik noted.

The Lowenstein Clinic has also assisted JPP with its domestic advocacy against the death penalty. In particular, Malik stressed that the reports authored by the Clinic have been valuable to efforts to end the misidentification of juvenile offenders’ ages, a practice that, the reports noted, deprives juveniles of their legal protection from the death penalty under international law. In its report on this practice, the Clinic had emphasized that the lack of age determination protocols under the previous legislation was one of the major reasons behind unlawful executions of juveniles. JPP has been successful in pushing through legislative reform on this issue. “On account of our sustained advocacy on this specific but important intervention,” Malik said, “protocols were included in the Juvenile Justice Systems Bill that was passed by the National Assembly in March 2017.”

In addition to the Clinic, the Lowenstein Project, an extracurricular human rights group associated with the Schell Center, has assisted JPP with its death penalty advocacy. A team of Yale undergraduate and law students researched and wrote a report, released in April 2018, on the clemency process for death row prisoners in Pakistan. Qureshi explained, “The President of Pakistan has implemented a blanket policy of refusing to grant clemency to death row prisoners and has made it effectively impossible for them to obtain pardons or commutations of death sentences.” Keerthana Annamaneni YC ’20, a member of the undergraduate Human Rights Program and the Lowenstein Project team, said she was confident that the report’s analysis of domestic, international, and comparative law would be valuable to JPP’s ongoing advocacy efforts against the use of the death penalty in Pakistan.

Overall, Malik considers the partnership between JPP and the Clinic to be “enriching” for the organization. She added that the Clinic’s work “will continue to inform our international and domestic advocacy as we continue our struggle to bring the death penalty in line with international standards” and pursue other human rights reforms.