A Commission Without Teeth: Pakistan's Minorities And The Brussels Test |
On April 28, 2026, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif inaugurated the first-ever High-Level EU-Pakistan Business Forum at Islamabad's Serena Hotel, drawing more than 1,000 European and Pakistani policymakers, financiers, and executives around a single proposition: that Pakistan is no longer a market to be hedged but a partner to be courted.
Officials reminded the room that the European Union has become Pakistan's second-largest trading partner, absorbing some €12 billion in bilateral goods trade in 2024, and that exports to the bloc have grown by more than 90 per cent since the country was admitted to the GSP scheme in 2014. The forum, in the words of one observer, was "a strategic declaration."
Six days earlier, on April 22, an entirely different declaration had been issued from Geneva. A group of United Nations human rights experts sounded an alarm over what they described as the "ongoing and widespread" abduction and forced religious conversion of women and girls from Pakistan's minority communities.
The findings were stark. Of the documented cases of forced conversion through marriage in 2025, seventy-five per cent of the victims were Hindu, twenty-five per cent Christian. Roughly eighty per cent of cases were registered in Sindh. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimates that more than twenty girls a month are subjected to such abuse, with the actual figure almost certainly higher because of barriers to reporting.
These two declarations belong, in theory, to the same Pakistan. In practice, they describe two countries.
The contradiction matters because the GSP regime is not, and has never been, a unilateral gift. The duty-free access that has driven a 108 per cent rise in Pakistan's exports to Europe over the past decade is conditional on the ratification and effective implementation of 27 international conventions covering human rights, labour standards, environmental protection and good governance.
With the upcoming mid-2026 GSP assessment and the transition to a new EU preferences scheme from 2027, the question European institutions will ask is no longer whether Pakistan has signed the conventions; it is whether Pakistani citizens, especially the most vulnerable, can actually invoke them.
A commission that is not feared is precisely the kind of commission a perpetrator in interior Sindh needs not factor into his calculations at all
A........