Despite these protections, many suspected juveniles sentenced to death prior to the Notification continue to be denied an inquiry into their claim of juvenility by provincial home departments and the courts. Courts frequently deny requests for age determination for juveniles sentenced prior to the enactment of the JJSO on the grounds that on account of all appeals having been exhausted the question of the age cannot be reopened or even worse, that a plea of juvenility may only be raised during the investigation or trial. Therefore, the accused persons are often caught in an impossible situation – the JJSO was not in existence at the start of their proceedings and they can no longer rely upon it as it is too late. C J U D G I N G J U V E N I L I T Y: F L AW E D D E T E R M I N AT I O N O F AG E Pakistan has one of the lowest rates of birth registration in the world. There are nearly 10 million children below the age of 5 years that are currently unregistered with the figure growing by nearly 3 million every year. Pakistan’s failure to fulfil the right to birth registration for its children means that the criminal justice system is marred by a high risk of wrongful arrests, detention and executions of child offenders. Under Section 10 of the JJSO it is the responsibility of the arresting officer to determine whether the person who has been arrested is a child or an adult. However, the law posits no mandatory requirement for the police to investigate the age of the accused at the time of the arrest. Since recording the age of the accused remains the discretion of the police, they also often deliberately overlook it in order to retain custody of the accused and to deny them the protections accorded to them under the JJSO. When the police do write the age, they do it on the basis of a cursory visual assessment and in practice this means that the age of a juvenile is recorded as much higher than what it is in reality. These visual assessments of the police are given the presumption of correctness by trial and appellate courts, and the burden of proof is placed on the suspect. Thus juveniles, especially those lacking in valid documents, find it virtually impossible to challenge the arbitrary assessments. An absence of comprehensive guidance on how and when to determine age of an accused person has marred a significant number of trials of juvenile offenders with confusion. Section 7 of the JJSO is the sole provision under Pakistani law dealing with determination of age inquiries, but it does not lay out any procedures or standardized protocols that need to be followed. Domestic jurisprudence is conflicted on evidentiary value of conflicting records, and an empirical analysis of judgements under Section 7 demonstrates that there is no apparent consistency of age determination procedure adopted by the courts; in practice they are free to choose any evidence that favours the verdict of their choice. Moreover, the unwillingness of the superior judiciary to entertain inquiries into age during the appellate stages of a case or even after the appeals have been concluded has certainly led to the execution of a number of juveniles. 07 DEATH ROW’S CHILDREN