Is the EU Commission Supporting Pakistan’s Authoritarian Regime?

The European External Action Service (EEAS), the European Union’s diplomatic service, has once again refused to publicly release its Election Expert Mission (EEM) report regarding Pakistan’s 2024 general elections. Following a request to make the document publicly available, EEAS responded on November 21 that the document cannot be disclosed “without the express consent of Pakistan.”

This occurred simultaneously as an EU committee was in Pakistan to assess the country’s compliance with the EU Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP). Meanwhile, there are concerns regarding the safety of the country’s imprisoned former PM Imran Khan. The EU—by refusing to release the report—once again appears to side with the authoritarian regime in Pakistan. This raises serious questions on the EU’s declared commitment to democracy and transparency, particularly in light of the allegations contained within the Commonwealth Observer Group’s (COG) report that Pakistan’s 2024 elections were neither free nor fair and were heavily influenced by the Pakistani Army, and that a major political party (Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf–PTI) was barred from contesting in the elections. 

Currently, an EU mission is conducting periodic assessments of Pakistan’s implementation of 27 U.N. conventions tied to the EU’s GSP+, which lowers or eliminates duties on awarded countries’ exports to the EU in exchange for their efforts to pursue “human and labor rights, environmental protection, and good governance.”

Rights activists have thus urged the European Union to investigate widespread human rights violations in Pakistan, including the persecution of religious minorities, during a review by a key EU mission that began monitoring the country’s eligibility for preferential trade terms on November 24. 

Pakistan is a major beneficiary of the trading opportunities offered by the EU GSP. From 2014, Pakistan benefits from generous tariff preferences (mostly zero duties on two-thirds of all product categories) under the so-called GSP+ arrangement.

However, blasphemy laws carry a death sentence in Pakistan. Christians are disproportionately targeted by those laws. While they only comprise 1.8% of the population (the Christian population is approximately 4,526,000), about a quarter of all blasphemy allegations are made against Christians. Those accusations often lead to mob violence and even murder. In 2024, a 73-year-old Pakistani Christian called Lazar (Nazir) Masih was brutally beaten to death after being falsely accused of burning the Quran. 

Pakistan adopted an Islamic Constitution in 1973 and Sharia law in its civil code. The recent Islamization process began with the 1986 introduction of blasphemy laws. In 2023, Pakistan’s Senate passed a bill to further tighten the country’s blasphemy laws by (among other things) increasing the punishment from three to at least ten years’ imprisonment.  

This has further encouraged vigilante attacks against Christians. In August 2023 in the city of Jaranwala, after false blasphemy allegations were made against two Christians, 26 churches and over 200 homes were either burned or damaged by Muslims. Hundreds of Christians had to flee their homes. However, this past August, Christians and other minorities in Pakistan were dealt a blow after an investigation into the misuse of the country’s blasphemy laws was suspended following a furious backlash from radical Islamic groups.

According to the human rights organization Open Doors, in Pakistan,

All Christians suffer from institutionalized discrimination; occupations seen as low and dirty are reserved for Christians by the authorities, as can be seen in job adverts. 

Christian women and girls are also trapped in cycles of debt and bonded labor, such as in brick kiln factories; within this context, they may be additionally exposed to sexual violence. Christian girls in bonded labor situations are more vulnerable to being illegally detained by their employer. In many cases of bonded labor, victims are either forced to convert to Islam and/or are given in child marriage by their employers.

As noted in a 2020 report by the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development (CREID), ideologically motivated sexual abuse in Pakistan is directed specifically at religious minorities, both for sexual predation but also as a ‘conquest’ to win the girl over to the majority religion, Islam.

The Pakistan government has completely failed to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities to protect the fundamental rights of Pakistani people guaranteed in the Constitution of Pakistan and protected by international conventions and protocols,” said Minorities Alliance Pakistan (MAP) Chairman Akmal Bhatti.

According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)’s 2025 Pakistan country report,

In 2025, the Pakistani government continues to commit particularly severe violations of religious freedom through its enforcement of its blasphemy law and other discriminatory regulations, including anti-Ahmadiyya laws, to restrict the rights of religious minorities. The government also tolerates egregious religious freedom violations through its lack of willingness to mitigate and punish associated mob violence.

Violence and harassment against Christians and Hindus persisted across the country throughout the first half of 2025, especially as authorities failed to provide accountability for previous attacks against them. In June, for example, an antiterrorism court in Jaranwala acquitted 10 men of rioting and burning a church in 2023. The court claimed ‘insufficient evidence,’ although church leaders reported that police had failed to conduct a transparent investigation. In March, the supervisor of a 22-year-old Christian, Waqas Masih, violently attacked him for refusing to convert to Islam. Masih reportedly suffered severe injuries to his throat that required his hospitalization. Reports indicate that the supervisor added insult to injury by accusing him of desecrating pages of the Qur’an. In April, a security guard shot and killed a Hindu man in Peshawar for refusing to convert to Islam. Hundreds of Hindus carried his body through the city, demanding immediate arrest of the perpetrator.

Reports also persisted during 2025 regarding cases of forced conversion in Pakistan, particularly involving the forced marriage of Christian and Hindu girls to Sunni Muslim men in Sindh and Punjab. In June, for example, the parents of three Hindu girls and their male cousin in Sindh accused a local teacher of abducting the four minors and forcibly converting them to Islam. The same month, in a separate case, a court in Shahdadpur, Sindh, ordered the parents of two minor Hindu girls to pay bonds of approximately 10 million rupees ($35,000) as a precondition for their children’s return. The accused, Farhan Khaskheli, abducted the two Hindu girls and forced them to convert to Islam in June. Additionally, in July, the Sindh Human Rights Commission ordered an official probe into the reported abduction and forced conversion of a Hindu girl in Badin District.”

This past July, UN experts warned that in Pakistan, widespread impunity for violence and discrimination against minorities must end:

We are shocked at reports of increasing violence against vulnerable communities on grounds of their religion or belief,” the experts said. “These communities have witnessed relentless attacks, killings and unending harassment for months in the context of hostility and advocacy of hatred against them.”

Pakistan must break the pattern of impunity that has allowed perpetrators of attacks and incitement to hatred and violence to act without restraint,” they said. “These attacks take place with tacit official complicity whilst the cycle of fear prevents people and institutions from upholding the rights and dignity of these minorities.”

In addition, Pakistan remains among the worst offenders of press freedom, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Many journalists in Pakistan have been fired from their jobs, arrested, threatened, or murdered in recent years in direct or suspected retaliation to their work.  Sohrab Barkat, an Islamabad-based correspondent for Pakistani news outlet Siasat and the host of his own YouTube channel, was detained at Islamabad International Airport on his way to a United Nations conference on November 26, CPJ reported. Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) registered a case against Barkat on August 5, alleging he had made “derogatory remarks” and spread misinformation about state institutions. 

Pakistan’s transnational repression of dissidents is also surging, as evidenced by the murder case of Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif in Kenya (2023) and the threats faced by Roshan Khattak, a Baloch Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge researching enforced disappearances in Pakistan’s province of Balochistan. 

Still, Pakistan remains the largest beneficiary of the EU’s GSP+ arrangement. The EU is Pakistan’s second most important trading partner, accounting for 12.4% of Pakistan’s total trade in 2024, while Pakistan was the EU’s 48^th largest trading partner in goods, accounting for 0.2% of EU trade.

Despite the fact that multiple international human rights groups have repeatedly warned the EU about Pakistan’s deteriorating human rights situation, the bloc continues its partnership with the country. Meanwhile, Pakistan pursues enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Balochistan, drone attacks on civilians in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as mob lynchings and arrests targeting Christians on charges of blasphemy.

Obviously, Pakistan is failing terribly in the field of human rights protection. The EU officials must no longer allow themselves to be influenced, manipulated, and misused by Pakistan to further its geopolitical and trade agenda. They must guard themselves from Pakistani influence operations, release their report on Pakistan’s 2024 national elections, and call out Pakistan’s gross human rights violations, systematic and continued persecutions of religious minorities, and the suppression of journalists and the press.