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.