File Photo. Asif Hassan—AFP
The Zohra and Z.Z. Ahmed Foundation has secured the release of five impoverished and differently abled prisoners languishing at Hyderabad’s Nara Jail due to paucity of funds despite having already secured bail.
There are currently tens of thousands of prisoners in jails across Pakistan who have secured bail from courts but cannot go free because they lack the funds to pay their surety bonds. Such prisoners, many of them juveniles or differently abled, lack the funds to pay bails, and cannot even hope to earn the Rs. 10,000 or less they need to go free. This has caused overcrowding in prisons, with the Human Rights Watch noting in a report published earlier this year that Pakistani prisons have at least 88,000 inmates against an officially approved capacity of 65,168.
The report blamed Pakistan’s “dysfunctional and inequitable” criminal justice system for the crisis, stressing on the urgent need for bail law reforms to address the overcrowding, noting a majority of prisoners were never convicted.
Recognizing the need to help these individuals, Foundation patron Mr. Iqbal Z. Ahmed, who has personal experience of being detained at Nara, has assumed a personal responsibility to pay the surety bonds of prisoners—starting with an initial batch of five—who face minor charges and are trapped in prisons as their cases go unheard for months or years. “It is criminal to keep these people, already burdened by poverty and facing minor charges, in overcrowded prisons indefinitely because they cannot afford to pay minimal bails,” said Mr. Ahmed.
“It is our collective responsibility to facilitate their release until our legal system is reformed beyond outdated colonial-era laws,” he said, noting there were currently around 450 prisoners at the Nara Jail, with several having already served out their sentences but lacking funds to pay fines.
In addition to Mr. Ahmed’s funding of bails of detainees, the Zohra and Z.Z. Ahmed Foundation has also pledged to establish a water filtration plant in Nara, which lacks clean drinking water for the local population. The organization has further pledged to establish a bakery in the region for vocational training of prisoners to grant them employment opportunities upon their release.