The Pakistani government rarely took concrete steps to identify and punish officials accused of human rights violations, a new report assessing the country’s human rights situation found.
This finding illustrates the apparent lack of accountability in a country where a “
sense of powerlessness” now grips its citizens, according to the Human Rights Commission.
In its report released on April 22, the U.S. State Department
listed a wide range of human rights challenges plaguing the South Asian country, including unlawful civilian deaths, serious restrictions on freedom of expression and religion, as well as violence against minority groups.
The report said that “violence, abuse, and social and religious intolerance by militant organizations and other non-state actors, both local and foreign, contributed to a culture of lawlessness.”
Pakistan has also been similarly flagged for its drastic human rights situation by rights groups
Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch, with recent violence prompting concerns over an increase in vigilante-style attacks on religious minorities in Pakistan in the past year, which are driven by the country’s discriminatory blasphemy laws and culture of impunity.
In August 2023, hundreds of rioters were
arrested after they torched five churches and houses belonging to the local Christian community in what has been one of the worst cases of violence against religious minorities in recent years. Torn pages of the Quran seen near the area apparently prompted the attack. Residents told activists that the police warned them hours before the attack but claimed they could do nothing to stop it.
Pakistan’s blasphemy laws
criminalize various acts, such as “misusing religious epithets,” “defiling” the Holy Quran, deliberately “outraging religious sentiment” and “using derogatory remarks in respect of the Prophet Muhammad.”
But human rights advocates have flagged these laws for emboldening perpetrators of mob violence to take the law into their own hands, attacking mostly minority sects and severely curtailing their rights to freedom of religion and expression.
Besides attacks on religious minorities, rights advocates have raised concerns about the continued violence against women and girls in Pakistan, with authorities doing nothing to stop the so-called “honor killings” that target women and girls. According to Human Rights Watch, roughly 1,000 women are
murdered in “honor killings” every year.