Existing laws say that when the apex court turns down the review petition of a death row convict, the legal battle ends there for the convict.
This therefore means that no existing laws of the country apply to the convict any more.
But, as a citizen of Bangladesh, the last thing the convict is entitled to is seeking clemency from the president. And that too has to be done exclusively under Section 49 of the Constitution of the country.
Section 49 gives the country’s president the power to pardon a person convicted of a certain crime by any court, tribunal or authority. The president also has the power to grant reprieves and respites and suspend or commute any sentence passed by lower bodies.
According to senior Supreme Court practitioner HAM Zahirul Islam Khan Panna, there is no prescribed form for seeking clemency; this is generally done in the form of an official application on a white paper with the convict’s signature at the bottom and has to be forwarded through the jail authorities.
The convict loses the right to consult his or her attorneys once the Supreme Court scraps the review petition.
So, the convict has to seek the clemency on his or her own accord. For people who are not accustomed to using legal terms or writing official letters and applications, the jail authorities arrange for assistance.
Panna, chairman of the Human Rights and Legal Aid Committee of the Bangladesh Bar Council, also said that the application must have at least one of two things for being considered as an official clemency plea.
Either there should be a mention of Section 49 of the constitution somewhere in the application or it must clearly say that the convict has admitted all the crimes and is seeking clemency.
In the first case, no matter what is written in the application, the authorities will take it that the convict has admitted all the crimes and is requesting the president to pardon him or her.
Unless at least any one of these two conditions is met, the jail authorities will not consider it a clemency appeal and therefore would not forward it to the next layer of authorities, namely, the Home Ministry, Law Ministry, Prime Minister’s Office and the president’s office.
Yesterday, both Law Minister Anisul Huq and Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal categorically confirmed that there were clear mentions of Section 49 in the applications submitted by Salauddin Quader Chowhdury and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid before they were executed.
Although right after the government announced on Saturday afternoon that the two war criminals had sought clemency, the families of Salauddin and Mujahid expressed doubts whether they had really done so.
Both families referred to their discussions with the war criminals on Thursday during which both had reportedly told their families that they would make a decision about clemency after consulting their attorneys.
However, since according to the existing laws they are not entitled to a meeting with their attorneys, the authorities did not allow them to. The two families have criticised the government for this as well.
Even after meeting Salauddin in jail for the last time hours before he was hanged, his son Hummam Quader said his father had not sought clemency.
Yesterday, after the war criminal was buried at his ancestral home in Raozan of Chittagong, Hummam said: “We had been repeatedly told that Salauddin Quader Chowdhury has sought clemency. The man who is known as the tiger of Bangla cannot bow down. When we talked to my father yesterday [Saturday], he said: ‘Your six feet two inches tall father is a tiger; he cannot bow down’.”
When asked about the two families’ claim, Home Minister Kamal told reporters in his office yesterday: “We assumed that they would not apologise. But there was mention of Section 49 in the title of the application by Mujahid. And Salauddin Quader filed his application in English. That too had mention of Section 49 towards the end.”
He also told reporters that the government has records of all the documents related to the mercy pleas and therefore the claims have no point.
Asked whether the two clemency applications would be published, Law Minister Anisul Huq said this cannot be done without the president’s permission.
He also said that the families of Salauddin and Mujahid were spreading propaganda to create confusion at home and abroad.
While the families of Salauddin and Mujahid claim that the two did not seek clemency, neither family has clarified whether the condemned men wrote to the president at all.