Local Euro MP leads calls on European Parliament to help halt execution of Leeds man in Pakistan

6.00.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Mon 15th May 2006

The Liberal Democrat MEP for Leeds, Diana Wallis, has taken the fight to halt the execution of a Leeds man to the European Parliament in Strasbourg today Monday. She spoke in an intervention today to raise this issue as Euro MPs gathered at the start of the Plenary session of the Parliament in Strasbourg.

Mirza Hussain, who is due to be executed on 1st June 2006, has been in detention in Pakistan for 18 years following his conviction for the alleged murder of a taxi driver in December 1988.

Amnesty International has described his trial as "unfair" but to date efforts to have the sentence overruled have proved unsuccessful.

Ms. Wallis has been working closely with Stephen Jakobi of Fair Trials Abroad and the President of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, so that the full weight of the European Union can be galvanised to overturn this apparent miscarriage of justice.

In the intervention Ms Wallis called on the European Parliament to write to the President of Pakistan appealing for clemency for Mirza Hussain.

She said it is impossible to imagine what Mirza Hussain has been through over the past 18 years.

"Imagine yourself as an 18 year old on holiday and in another country, you take a taxi. It turns into a nightmare, there are no witnesses but the taxi driver ends up dead and you go straight to the first police station. You say he pulled a gun on you and what happened was self defence on your part.

"This leads to a legal process over 18 years, 18 years that you spend in prison away from you family. Enduring a legal process that goes back and forth. Condemning you to death then finding you innocence then starting again until every appeal exhausted you are condemned to death a second time; this after 18 years, that is half your life in prison, some on death row.

"This is the terrible story on my constituent Mirza Tahir Hussain."

Fellow Lib Dem Euro MP Saj Karim hopes to raise the matter directly with the President of Pakistan Musharraf next week when he leads an EU delegation to Pakistan only days before the proposed date of Mirza's execution.