Rakhshanda Mehtab
Every couple of years, Brussels publishes a report on Pakistan’s GSP+ status, and every time you can almost predict which paragraph will get underlined first. The 2023–2025 review has arrived. It acknowledges that laws have moved forward, which is fair, and then it settles straight back into the old refrain: minority rights. Pakistan, the report repeats, must do more. The advice isn’t shocking. What’s a little harder to take seriously is who is delivering it.
Look at them. Countries that are still wrestling with their own minority rights record continue to lecture Pakistan on religious freedom. It’s not a cheap shot; it’s simply what the record shows. France decided years ago that a headscarf was a public-order problem: banned in schools in 2004, full-face veils in public in 2011, and just last year, in 2023, the abaya was shown the classroom door. Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands have since imposed similar restrictions on face coverings. If any of this were happening in Pakistan, Brussels would have resolutions drafted by lunchtime. When it happens in Paris, it’s called republican values. That’s not a principle. That’s a power move wearing the language of principle.
Now shift the lens to the ground in Pakistan. In a country where 97 per cent of the population is Muslim, minorities freely practice their faith. Not in some abstract, feel-good sense, the numbers are right there. Pakistan has 2,189 churches, which works out to roughly one church for every 1,206 Christians. There are 732 temples, one for every 5,669 Hindus, and 58 gurdwaras, one for every 159 Sikhs. Compare that with the United Kingdom, so often held up as a model of pluralism, where a single mosque has to serve around 2,249 Muslims. If places of worship are a rough measure of religious accommodation, and they are, then Pakistan’s minorities are not just getting by; they’re being provided for in ways that embarrass the European benchmarks.
So why does the GSP+ report keep missing this? A big part of the answer lies in where the information comes from. Such reports often rely on selective narratives promoted by agenda-driven NGOs that secure funding by exaggerating isolated incidents while ignoring the broader reality. A single event in a distant village or a local disagreement over a piece of land gets peeled away from its surroundings, cleaned up into a crisis story, and served as the national portrait. The funding cycle depends on the wound, never the healing, so the everyday, unremarkable coexistence of millions, Sunday mass, the evening temple bell, the gurdwara kitchen feeding the poor, simply disappears from view. The report then, maybe without intending to, turns this selective gaze into official assessment.
And here’s the part that should make any honest observer pause. The same scrutiny that gets dialled up to maximum on Lahore suddenly goes soft when it sweeps over Lyon or Copenhagen. Rising Islamophobia across Europe, documented by the very human rights bodies the EU helps fund, is treated as a social hiccup rather than a systemic failure. The electoral surge of anti-Muslim parties, the deliberate desecration of scriptures defended as free speech, the shrinking public space for women who dress according to their faith, none of this is treated as an “international human rights controversy.” And yet, a handful of isolated incidents inside Pakistan are routinely amplified into exactly that. They amplify isolated incidents into international human rights controversies while overlooking Pakistan’s sustained efforts to protect minorities, strengthen legal safeguards and ensure their constitutional rights and religious freedoms.
Those efforts are not imaginary. The constitutional framework is there. The superior judiciary has pushed forward, case by case, to give minority protections real legal weight. The 2014 Supreme Court judgment directing the state to safeguard the rights of religious minorities was not a performance for a European audience; it was the country’s own constitutional conscience speaking. Kartarpur is not a slogan; it’s a functioning corridor of openness. None of this means the work is finished, no country can claim that, but the trajectory is genuine and it deserves a more careful reading than it usually gets.
Pakistan’s commitment to protecting religious minorities deserves recognition, not selective criticism. Before questioning Pakistan, these so-called liberal states should address rising discrimination, Islamophobia and shrinking religious freedoms within their own societies. A little bit of that honest self-assessment would do more for human rights than another round of the same old script. Without it, the Brussels ritual will remain what it increasingly looks like: not a review, but a re-enactment.
—The writer is MS Research Scholar at IIUI, a freelance Content Writer & a Columnist.
