Abdul Basit?s planned execution last month was postponed but he is still on death row
Abdul Basit could not be hanged in compliance with the jail manual because he is in a wheelchair, a magistrate said when ordering the postponement.
Pakistan?s prison guidelines require that a prisoner stand on the gallows.
Rights groups say hanging a handicapped person would constitute cruel and degrading treatment, and that there is a risk of the hanging going wrong.
Abdul Basit, 43, is paralysed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair after becoming ill in prison.
Pakistan reintroduced the death penalty in December 2014 and has hanged 239 people since.
At the time, the government said it was a measure to combat terrorism after the Taliban massacred more than 150 people, most of them children, in a Peshawar school.
Basit was convicted six years ago of murder and was to have been hanged in Lahore last month ? but that was postponed.
A court then ordered the jail authorities to go ahead with the hanging, even though his mercy petition filed on 22 July before the president is still pending. Both the Supreme Court and the Lahore High Court have given their consent to the execution.
It is unclear if any time limit was imposed on the most recent postponement.
Campaigners say there is a danger that the hanging could go wrong and end up being a breach of the prisoner?s dignity ? which is protected by Pakistani laws.
?The rules presume that the convict [can] walk up to the gallows, which is not possible in Abdul Basit?s case,? Wassam Waheed, a spokesman for Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) told the BBC.
In a statement on Sunday the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) described the court order to hang Abdul Basit as an offence ?against all norms of civilised justice? which would raise awkward questions about the Pakistani justice system and ?indict the Pakistani state and society as brutal entities?.
The HRCP also urged the president to stay the execution and grant him a reprieve.
Pakistan has the world?s largest number of death row inmates, with more than 8,000 people reported to be awaiting execution.
It is on course to have one of the highest rates of executions in the world.
BBC
