The Punjab government on Thursday filed review petitions against three significant judgments of the Supreme Court (SC), challenging rulings related to sexual assault, sentencing in multiple murder cases, and the acquittal of a proclaimed offender.
According to the review petitions filed by Additional Prosecutor General Punjab Ahmad Raza Gilani, the contested judgments include a ruling in which the sexual assault of a woman was categorised as consensual adultery, a decision allowing a convict responsible for killing sixteen people to serve sentences concurrently rather than separately, and a judgment acquitting a proclaimed offender along with other accused in a criminal case.
According to the 24NewsHD TV channel, in the review petition concerning the sexual assault case, the Punjab government has argued that converting rape into consensual adultery was incorrect. It maintained that courts generally avoid making adverse observations against victims of sexual violence to preserve their dignity and social standing.
The petition further stated that the court failed to address the legal and social status of the child born as a result of the accused’s reprehensible act, adding that the judgment had imposed a permanent social stigma on the affected woman and her family.
In the second review petition, the provincial government contended that the issue of counting multiple sentences as one should be reconsidered in light of the specific circumstances and facts of the case, as a total of twenty-one people from two families were killed, and the matter fell within the jurisdiction of anti-terrorism laws.
According to the petition, sixteen people were killed in one incident and five in another, yet the sentence for the murder of sixteen individuals was treated as equivalent to that of a single murder by allowing the sentences to run concurrently. The petition noted that the Supreme Court itself has previously ruled that the decision to run sentences concurrently or consecutively must be made after examining the facts of each case.
The review plea also sought clarification of paragraphs sixteen and seventeen of a Supreme Court judgment concerning the definition of terrorism and requested reconsideration of the decision allowing the sentence for the murder of sixteen people to run concurrently. The Supreme Court has previously held that the definition of terrorism under Section 6 of the Anti-Terrorism Act is broad in scope.
Sources said that the Punjab Prosecution Department had earlier filed a review petition against a Supreme Court decision refusing to accept DNA evidence after an eleven-year delay in a 2015 case. A separate review petition has also been filed against the judgment acquitting a proclaimed offender, along with other accused.
