Pakistan has around 8,000 people on death row. What kinds of crimes have these people “committed”?Isabel Buchanan Yes, I’d be careful saying “committed”; it’s more accurately crimes that people have been convicted of. The most common is charges of murder, but there’s a really large number of offences that are capital offences in Pakistan. I think it’s more than 20 and these include non-lethal offences, so non-murder and manslaughter offences. Blasphemy is one of the main, most controversial ones, kidnapping as well, drug-related offences.  You first became involved in working for prisoners in Pakistan through British nationals – of whom more than 20 are on death row. What’s their situation?There’s something of a pattern to these cases. Many Pakistanis moved to Britain in the 20th century and often their children or their children’s children will go back to Pakistan for long periods of time to meet their cousins or aunts or extended family. It’s during those visits that they can find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system, often over land disputes. Those who left Pakistan will often be more affluent than their neighbours back home, and the absentee landlord becomes the object of much envy for neighbours. They are also not necessarily connected so closely to the community so they lose the defences that a very interconnected person has available to them.  The reliance on witnesses and knowledge of the police system and those sorts of things puts them at a significant disadvantage if they are then accused of a crime in Pakistan. It makes it a very difficult situation for them.  The really difficult stage is in those last few hours when there is actually absolutely nothing you can do  It’s not unknown for lawyers in Pakistan to be assassinated. Does this make them more wary of taking on death row cases?It’s fair to say that not many lawyers take on blasphemy cases. More lawyers take on death-penalty cases for other crimes. But yes, there are a number of very high-profile instances of lawyers being assassinated by people walking into their office and simply shooting them at point-blank range. Or those who are outspoken being assassinated in other ways. It has a real chastening effect.  When you moved to Pakistan in 2011 it was to work with a young Pakistani lawyer called Sarah Belal. In May 2015, she was told by a friend at the Ministry of Interior to leave the country immediately. How dangerous was her situation?Well, she’s extraordinarily brave, far more than I am, so she makes light of that situation, but I think it was very dangerous and she’s quite defiant in the face of that danger. She’s very committed to these cases and she believes it’s right to do them and it’s wrong that those people are facing a death sentence. That’s where her reasoning stops. She doesn’t take the danger into account, but it is very real.  When you first arrived in Pakistan you were 23. Were you fearful yourself?Oh, I played a very minor role. I was really an intern and then an assistant to Sarah for most of it. I was not a target in any way, and so no, in short. There remain all the risks of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; quite apart from working on these legal cases, Pakistan itself is not the most stable of countries. I worried about Sarah a bit, but I wasn’t at the forefront of anything.  Why did you want to go to Pakistan?There was certainly an element of chance, but I was also particularly drawn there. I graduated in law from Glasgow University in 2010 and didn’t really know what to do with myself. So I started to volunteer at Reprieve, who work on behalf of death row prisoners around the world. This seemed to me an uncomplicatedly good thing to do; the one thing I did know was that I was anti-death penalty. So I worked on the Pakistan death-penalty desk and then I realised that I wanted to understand Pakistan itself better so I asked Sarah if she’d have me as an intern in Lahore.  Did you have a previous connection to the country?I grew up in Scotland, which is not particularly ethnically diverse as a country. The one minority community of which there are quite a number is Pakistanis, particularly in Glasgow. There are between 20,000 and 30,000 Pakistanis in Glasgow. So Pakistan was at once very familiar to me – my neighbours were Pakistanis, my local shop was run by a Pakistani man who just stocked different foodstuffs to the ones that other shops might. And, being really quite parochial and knowing nothing beyond Scotland, I loved Pakistani puddings from the age of 19. Yet the news coverage particularly and the cases I came across at Reprieve showed a place that looked quite foreign and hostile. I was intrigued by the relationship between those two things.  There was a big change in Pakistan in 2014 and 2015, after Taliban militants killed 132 children and nine staff at Peshawar’s army public school. The government began executing prisoners on death row at a much higher rate, including some of Sarah Belal’s clients. What impact did that have on you?It was really horrifying. In the first year [after the attack] about 350 people were executed, almost a person per day, so the rate was extraordinary and unrelenting. Sarah and I used to joke about the fact that she and I were being hard as nails and thick-skinned, because when you’re working on the cases, your job is not to be sad, your job is to do everything you can to overturn the sentence or get some point on which the death penalty can be rescinded. But the really difficult stage is in those last few hours and the hours afterwards, when there is actually absolutely nothing you can do or it’s already happened. At that point it’s impossible to escape the horror of it and also it feels right to embrace that sadness, because it becomes a sign of respect, rather than you shirking your duties as a lawyer.  There’s a vogue at the moment for true crime, miscarriages of justice, such as The Jinx and Making a Murderer on TV, and the podcast Serial. There must be hundreds of those kinds of stories in Pakistan. Are these shows too close to your day job for you to really enjoy them?No, I think they are brilliant. There’s a difference between being a lawyer on a case and being a journalist looking into a case and it’s something people like Janet Malcolm draw out really well in their writing. Law – at least in Britain, Pakistan and America – is an adversarial process, so there’s a give and take of argument the whole way through these cases. When it’s investigated, that’s quite a different process, so I find it really interesting to see the two different approaches to the same story, as it were.  Away from work, how was living in Pakistan?I really loved it. Lahore is an unbelievably beautiful city and it’s quite unvisited. One comparison is Delhi, which is another great Mughal capital that is of course thronged with tourists for most months of the year, and Lahore is really quite untouristy. It’s very vibrant, there are people everywhere in Lahore, it’s a very living place. I would wear local clothes, which I did most of the time, and sit in the back of the rickshaw, which actually opened up the city to me in a whole new way, because you’re the most discreet traveller sitting in the back of a rickshaw, no one can really see you. Whereas if you’re in a car with tinted windows, everybody notices you driving around.  You learned to speak Urdu in Pakistan. Do you keep it up now you’re back?Since coming back to England, whenever I hear someone in a shop speaking Urdu I always join in with them. I’ve got very Scottish pasty skin and fair hair, so I look very British really – by that I mean Caucasian female – and the last thing people are expecting is for me to speak Urdu. It always leads to really fun conversations.  You are about to start working as a barrister in London. Will your experiences in Pakistan stay with you?Yes, it was something of a forging in the fire. I was given far more responsibility by Sarah than I would have had in Britain, mostly because it was a very small charitable organisation where it was all hands on deck. So I really experienced the responsibility of being a lawyer and emotionally, too, because in Pakistan it was literally a matter of life and death in a way that not many cases are. Also just working in real adversity. Now even a late night in chambers when you are making yourself a cup of tea at 2am and have just bought some sushi from Itsu looks pretty cosy compared to writing the final-day application at 2am in Lahore where it’s 50C and you’ve got no AC and someone’s threatening to kill your boss. It’s good to have that perspective.
The Scottish lawyer talks about her forthcoming book recalling her time as a 23-year-old working on death-row cases in Pakistan