Barrister Naveed Qazi
There is a particular kind of defensiveness that governments display when confronted with human rights assessments. The instinct is to question the motives of those doing the measuring, to frame external criticism as a political attack, and to dismiss inconvenient findings as exaggeration or bias. Pakistan’s authorities have not been immune to this reflex. Yet this posture, however politically understandable, is intellectually dishonest and practically self-defeating. A country cannot improve what it refuses to honestly examine. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s latest report, the State of Human Rights in 2025, demands not a defensive response but a serious and sustained one.
The HRCP is not a foreign body with an agenda against Pakistan. It is a domestic institution staffed by Pakistanis who care deeply about the country’s future. Its annual assessments are grounded in documented evidence, field observations and a long institutional memory of what Pakistan’s rights landscape has looked like across decades of democratic and authoritarian governance alike. When such an institution issues a sobering report, the appropriate response from those in authority is to read it carefully, engage its findings honestly, and commit to addressing what it identifies. Anything less is a failure of the responsibility that comes with holding public office.
The 2025 report does not offer comfort. It describes a year marked by severe contraction of civic space, erosion of judicial independence, and deepening insecurity across multiple dimensions of public life. Each of these phrases carries real human weight. Civic space contracting means citizens finding it harder to organise, speak, protest and participate in public affairs without fear of legal harassment or worse. Judicial independence eroding means the courts, which ought to be the last refuge of the ordinary citizen against state overreach, becoming less reliable as impartial arbiters of justice. Deepening insecurity means people going about their lives under a shadow of vulnerability that the state is obligated but failing to lift.
The report’s treatment of freedom of expression deserves particular attention. The amendments made to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act have transformed a law ostensibly designed to combat cybercrime into an instrument capable of silencing dissent. Journalists’ associations have documented this at length, and their testimony is consistent: the law creates a climate of fear across the media landscape that produces self-censorship on a wide scale. Reporters and editors calculate what they can safely say, which means the public receives a filtered version of reality. A democracy cannot function properly when its information ecosystem is shaped by fear rather than by the honest pursuit of truth. The chilling effect is not a figure of speech. It is a daily reality for working journalists in Pakistan, and it diminishes the quality of public discourse for every citizen who depends on a free press to hold power to account.
The amendments to the Anti-Terrorism Act, both at the federal level and in Balochistan, present a different but equally serious concern. Extending the permissible period of detention without charge is one of the most dangerous tools a state can acquire. The logic of security legislation is seductive: exceptional threats appear to justify exceptional powers. But history across many countries and many decades has shown that these powers, once granted, are rarely confined to the exceptional cases they were designed to address. They migrate. They expand. They are applied to critics, political opponents, journalists and ordinary people who simply had the misfortune of being in the wrong place or holding inconvenient opinions. The provision for prolonged detention without charge violates a foundational principle of the rule of law: that the state must justify its deprivation of a citizen’s liberty before an independent court, and must do so promptly. When that principle is compromised, the entire architecture of rights protections becomes fragile.
There were, as the report acknowledges, some genuine advances worth recognising. The passage of the National Commission for Minorities Act is a meaningful step for Pakistan’s non-Muslim citizens, who have long endured a precarious relationship with state protection. The legislative moves against child marriage in Islamabad and Balochistan, places with very different political cultures and administrative contexts, signal at least a nominal commitment to protecting the most vulnerable from one of the most damaging practices still tolerated in Pakistani society. These developments should be welcomed. They demonstrate that positive change is possible when political will exists. The question is why that will remains so unevenly distributed across the full spectrum of rights obligations.
Pakistan’s external posture over the past year has improved considerably. The country has positioned itself as a constructive mediator in some of the world’s most difficult disputes, including the extraordinarily complex diplomatic terrain of the Iran-US confrontation. This is not a trivial achievement. It requires skill, credibility and a capacity to maintain relationships with parties whose interests are sharply opposed. Pakistan’s role in such contexts reflects genuine diplomatic capability and a foreign policy ambition that the country’s size and strategic location make both possible and necessary.
But international credibility is not separable from domestic conduct indefinitely. A state that presents itself as a responsible actor in global affairs while simultaneously narrowing civic space, weakening judicial independence and creating legal instruments for the suppression of dissent eventually faces a credibility gap. The world notices the distance between how a government behaves externally and how it treats its own people. More importantly, Pakistan’s own citizens notice. They are the primary audience that matters.
The aspiration to become a welfare state, a state that actively protects its weakest and poorest citizens from exploitation rather than looking away or participating in their vulnerability, is a noble one that Pakistan’s founders articulated with clarity and sincerity. Achieving it requires more than good intentions. It requires legal frameworks that are consistently enforced, administrative systems that are genuinely accountable, and a political culture that treats rights not as concessions granted under pressure but as obligations owed unconditionally.
Civil society, political parties and rights activists must continue pressing for these standards. But the state must also take the first step: acknowledge that serious problems exist, that documented evidence of those problems is a contribution rather than an attack, and that the work of reform cannot wait for a more convenient moment. There is no more convenient moment than the present.
