Women’s History Month Profile Series: Sarah Belal, Executive Director of Justice Project Pakistan

This month, DPIC celebrates Women’s History Month with weekly profiles of notable women whose work has been significant in the modern death penalty era. The second entry in this series is Sarah Belal, founder and executive director of Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a nonprofit organization in Lahore, Pakistan. 

Now a prominent international lawyer and human rights advocate, Sarah Belal says she was “thoroughly uninspired” by law school. It was not until her first visit to a Pakistani prison where “there were hundreds of people abandoned, forgotten and sentenced to die,” that she realized what she was called to do.  

Ms. Belal’s inspiration for founding Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) began when she read a letter in the newspaper. It was from a man whose brother, a Pakistani father of two, was sentenced to death for a crime he committed in self-defense, and he was begging for someone to help him. “Zulfiqar was my first client,” Ms. Belal recounted. “I just picked up the phone, called the newspaper’s office, and got his brother’s number. The next thing I knew, he was standing outside my door with a mountain of case files. That was 2009.” Now, Ms. Belal leads a dedicated staff of attorneys, mitigation specialists, investigators, and researchers who provide direct representation, train judges and lawyers, educate the public, and work toward systemic reform of the criminal justice system in Pakistan. Ms. Belal describes JPP as “a legal action non-profit organization that provides pro bono representation to the most vulnerable Pakistani prisoners facing harsh punishments in the courts of law and the court of public opinion.” 

Since its founding, JPP has secured more than 40 stays of execution for Pakistanis, sentenced in both Pakistan and other countries.  Many of JPP’s clients have severe mental illness, and JPP has invested considerable resources into training judges and lawyers about how mental illness affects criminal culpability. As Ms. Belal explains, JPP defends “people who are so mentally ill they don’t even know why they’re imprisoned. People with physical disabilities who cannot even stand or care for their own hygiene.” In 2021, JPP and Ms. Belal were instrumental in convincing the Pakistani Supreme Court to prohibit the execution of people with severe mental illness. 

While they do not advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, Ms. Belal and her team work for criminal justice reforms and capital punishment practices in line with Quranic teachings and international law. JPP has also advocated for a moratorium on executions in Pakistan. According to Ms. Belal, “The Islamic standard for imposing the death penalty is so strict it must be only imposed in the rarest of rare cases. Pakistan, however, has the death penalty for 33 crimes. Our history and data show that it doesn’t work. We have huge problems in our criminal justice system that result in many people wrongfully convicted and hanged.” 

Ms. Belal, a graduate of Smith College and the University of Oxford, has received prestigious awards such as the Franco-German Human Rights Prize, the National Human Rights Prize by the Federal Ministry of Human Rights, and the Echoing Green Global Fellowship.