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Pakistan’s lawmakers on Friday passed in the national assembly a controversial resolution calling for the public hanging of persons convicted of sexually abusing and murdering children, according to news reports. A report in Karachi-based English daily Dawn reported that the resolution referred to the recent killing of an eight-year-old boy Iwaz Noor in the country.
“This house demands that to stop these shameful and brutal killings of children and give a strong deterrent effect, the killers and rapists should not only be given death penalty by hanging but they should be hanged publicly," the resolution states, as per Dawn.
While the resolution was cleared with a majority of lawmakers backing it, MPs from the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) came out openly against the vote.
"We cannot put public hanging into practice as it violates the laws of the United Nations,” PPP leader Raja Pervez Ashraf was quoted as saying.
In the government ranks, a notable exception who condemned the passage of the resolution was country’s information and broadcasting minister Fawad Chaudhary, who was quoted as saying that “barbarism” was not the answer to such crimes.
The country’s human rights minister Shireen Mazari noted on Twitter that the resolution "was not government-sponsored but an individual act,” as per news reports.
