Pakistan carries out mass executions

Pakistan hanged 12 male convicts on Tuesday, a government spokesman said, the most executed on the same day since an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in December.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lifted a de facto ban on capital punishment on Dec. 17, a day after Pakistani Taliban gunmen attacked a school and killed 132 students and nine teachers. The slaughter put pressure on the government to do more to combat the fighters.

Twenty-seven people have been hanged since then, most of them Taliban, but last week it emerged that officials quietly widened the policy to include all prisoners on death row whose appeals had been rejected.

"They were not only terrorists. They included the other crimes. Some of them were murderers, and some did other heinous crimes," an Interior Ministry spokesman said of the 12 executed at various prisons.

The moratorium on executions had been in place since a democratic government took power from a military ruler in 2008. Only one person was executed during the moratorium: a soldier convicted by a court martial and hanged in 2012.

Supporters of the death penalty in Pakistan argue that it is the only effective way to the deal with the scourge of rebel groups in the country.

But human rights groups say many convictions in Pakistan are highly unreliable. Its antiquated criminal justice system barely functions, torture has often been used to extract confessions, and police are rarely trained in investigation, rights officials say.

"This shameful retreat to the gallows is no way to resolve Pakistan's pressing security and law and order problems," Rupert Abbott, Amnesty International's deputy Asia-Pacific director, said last week.

There are more than 8,000 Pakistanis on death row.

One of them is Shafqat Hussain, who is due to be executed on Thursday. His lawyers say he was 14 when he was arrested a decade ago for the kidnapping and manslaughter of a child, and his conviction was based on a confession extracted after nine days of torture.

European Union diplomats have also raised the issue of capital punishment. The EU granted Pakistan the much coveted GSP+ status in 2014, giving the country access to highly favorable trade tariffs, conditional on Pakistan's following through on certain commitments on human rights.

Al Jazeera and wire services