SPA A four-member Indian team, which will be part of the Pakistan-India Joint Judicial Committee on Prisoners (JJCP), will arrive in Pakistan on April 8 to visit different jails where Indian nationals are imprisoned and will check the record of those who are still in jails despite serving their jail term. "We agreed in the maiden meeting of the JJCP on February 26, 2008 in India that the judicial teams of Pakistan and India would visit each other's countries to check the jails' record for identifying their respective nationals and also examining them physically," said the JJCP member and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) minister for law, parliamentary affairs and human rights, Justice (retd) Mian Muhammad Ajmal. He said it was decided in the meeting that both the countries would release and repatriate the prisoners once it was established that they had served their term. Kashmir Singh, an Indian citizen who had been in jail for 35 years on death row for spying, was released on March 3 on the order of President Pervez Musharraf. The Indian team will go to those jails where they had the information of its citizens' presence and would also go through the official record," Ajmal said. He said later a Pakistani team would visit the Indian jails to get the prisoners released. We had also decided in the meeting that both the countries would swap prisoners' list," he added. Ajmal said the Indian and Pakistani embassies would assist their respective judicial teams in each other's countries. The two countries agreed in January 2007 to form a committee of the retired judges from both the countries to look for prisoners in Pakistani and Indian jails. The committee consists of eight members, four from Pakistan and as many from India. Ajmal said the JJCP would ensure that no citizen was languishing in jail without being charged or properly tried. He added that the committee would strenuously work to make sure that no prisoner, in each country, was arrested on false charges like Khalid Mehmood.
