A. Pakistan's age determination procedures fall short of International standards Pakistan's procedural protections for juveniles do not meet international standards, and even the limited protections it does provide are widely ignored in practice. Given its obligations as a party to both the ICCPR and CRC, the burden is on the Pakistani government to take all necessary steps to ensure that individuals not be executed for offenses committed as juveniles. However, the continued execution of individuals for offenses committed while under the age of 18 underscores a persistent and widespread failure to determine accurately the age of defendants. Though Pakistan's domestic enactment of the CRC, the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance of 2000 (JJSO),220 ostensibly appears to satisfy international legal protections for the due process of children, its application perpetuates what the Pakistani Supreme Court once deemed a “feeble right.”221 For instance, Section 7 states: “If a question arises as to whether a person before it is a child for the purposes of this Ordinance, the juvenile court shall record a finding after such inquiry which shall include a medical report for determination of the age of the child.”222 In practice, however, these Section 7 reviews fail to occur or simply recycle earlier inaccurate age determinations.223 Consequently, juveniles enter the justice system with unprotected “adult” status, subjecting juveniles to the same (broken) legal proceedings as adults. In turn, many are sentenced to death, rendering hollow the JJSO's prohibition on juvenile capital punishment. Judicial inquiries into the juvenility of criminal defendants are crucial in Pakistan, where more than 70 percent of children are not registered at birth, especially children belonging to religious or minority groups and children living in rural areas.224 Juveniles who have not been admitted to school regularly lack any documentation of their estimated age, but even school records may prove unreliable as a result of inattentiveness or carelessness by school staff about the registration of correct birth years. Because alternative age determination techniques in the country remain rudimentary, Pakistani courts have pronounced and confirmed death sentences on children based solely on visual assessment by the police. Often, courts refuse to take into account evidence of juvenility even when such evidence is provided by the Pakistani authorities themselves.225 Pakistani jail authorities concede that the medical exam conducted when a prisoner enters a jail is usually based only on a visual assessment of the prisoner, as is the age recorded in their own statement before the court. Though prisoners formally sign such statements, these declarations are often unreliable, as many prisoners are illiterate. The Pakistani Supreme Court discussed this problematic practice in a recent judgment: “Recording of an accused person's age at the time of recording his statement under s.342 CrPC is invariably based upon a cursory visual assessment which can substantially be off the mark, as proverbially, appearances can be deceptive.”226 Despite this acknowledgment from the country's highest tribunal, the criminal justice system continues to rely on unscientific—and often flawed—determinations of age. Yet this evidentiary difficulty forms only one part of the problem. Because accused individuals are not aware that juvenility may even be relevant to their criminal proceedings, they often fail to raise this issue in court. Crucially, both defendants' counsel and trial courts habitually fail to inquire into this A “MOST SERIOUS CRIME”: PAKISTAN'S UNLAWFUL USE OF THE DEATH PENALTY 27