Where the state should be focusing on efforts to uphold the rule of law, reduce violence against women, children and transgender persons, protect the rights of workers and peasants, and fulfil people’s right to health and education, it has instead prioritized its own authority at the expense of democratic norms and people’s fundamental rights. HRCP calls on all political parties to reach a consensus on civilian autonomy and guarding federalism.

The government must focus on strengthening trade unions and seriously consider instituting a living wage, especially for vulnerable workers. HRCP also believes that the provision of healthcare and education is the duty of the state. Student unions must be restored and special attention paid to the plight of incarcerated fisherfolk, stateless persons and rising suicides triggered by poverty, particularly in Thar. The contentious provincial labour codes must be revisited in consultation with trade unions.

HRCP believes that the climate emergency is now an existential crisis for the country. The most pressing issues are the lethal levels of air pollution in Punjab, posing serious risks to health, and the immediate threat of water scarcity, especially in lower riparian Sindh, where the construction of canals on the Indus under the Green Pakistan Initiative has raised objections from small farmers and peasants.

We strongly oppose the Gilgit-Baltistan Land Reforms Bill 2024, which seeks to centralize control over private, communal and ancestral land in the guise of ‘reforms’ for development. This appropriation of land by powerful vested interests will further marginalize people and stoke unrest. The state must give Gilgit-Baltistan its due constitutional rights as demanded by its residents.

HRCP deplores the increasing use of short-term enforced disappearances, including against the political opposition, and calls once again for the head of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances to be removed for sheer incompetence.

The conduct of the state has been marked by violence with impunity and a tendency to succumb to far-right ideologies. This was evident from the extrajudicial killings of two people accused of blasphemy in Umerkot and Quetta, from continued attacks on Ahmadiyya graveyards and sites of worship with police complicity at the instigation of the TLP, and hundreds of mostly young people accused of online blasphemy languishing in Punjab jails amid allegations of the FIA’s involvement in their torture. The alarmingly high number of extrajudicial killings, especially in Sindh, must be investigated and perpetrators held to account.

HRCP notes with concern the fact that its chairperson was detained for questioning by the police and four FIRs filed against its members in connection with their human rights work.

The sharp rise in militancy in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including increasingly regular attacks on construction workers, miners and polio workers, is rapidly moving towards a point of no return. HRCP calls on Baloch and Baloch-Pashtun leaders to sit together and devise an independent solution to the crisis in the province. Pashtun leaders in Kurram must do the same to resolve the months-long conflict in the district.

HRCP wishes to draw special attention to the detention of human rights defender Idris Khattak, who has now spent five years in custody following a military trial on fabricated charges. He must be released immediately and unconditionally.

Asad Iqbal Butt
Chairperson

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The first decade of the twenty-first century featured multiple forms of contentious politics: (i) the lawyers’ movement for the restoration of the judiciary which culminated in a broad political movement against Pervez Musharraf’s military dictatorship; (ii) the nation-wide campaigns against privatisation of public utilities (Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Limited); (iii) the region- and city-specific peasant and labour mobilisations for agrarian land rights and improved wages; (iv) the struggles of public-sector employees for better service structures, and (v) the ethno-nationalist uprisings in peripheral regions away from central Punjab districts.

By and large, these social movements took place in isolation, without a broadbased network among activists and mobilisers which could synthesise the various particularistic struggles or social movements into a unified mass movement. Yet in the last ten years, and more particularly since the last five years, there is a conscious effort to link various social movements. This new effort features mobilisations by a new generation of tech-savvy, college-educated, and globally oriented activists. In linking struggles of peripheral actors and spaces to those in the centre, the demands or grievances raised in these mobilisations have encompassed a range of issues concerning, on the one hand, global capitalism and Pakistan’s peripheral position in it (the anti-austerity aspect), and the country’s neo-colonial political system (the anti-authoritarian aspect), on the other.

To assess this contentious politics manifested in the form of social movements and its relationship to the democratisation process, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan conducted a series of focus group discussions (FGDs) with activists and organisers of various ongoing struggles and with public intellectuals closely observing them. In all, there were eight FGDs (held between October and November 2021), seven of which were held online which allowed participation across Pakistan. The broad themes were the students’ solidarity movement, the women’s rights movement, enforced disappearances, victims of urban development, Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, public sector workers’ collectives and role of social media in social movements. This report is a synthesis of major issues that emerged in these FGDs. The following sections discuss: (i) the political-economic and cultural context for the various social movements; (ii) women’s activism; (iii) students’ politics; (iv) anti-war and antiauthoritarian activism; (v) right to the city struggles; and (vi) anti-austerity activism of public-sector workforce. Subsequently, the report concludes with key lessons offered for rights activism.

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People’s freedom to assemble peacefully is enshrined in Article 16 of Pakistan’s constitution as follows:

Every citizen shall have the right to assemble peacefully and without arms, subject to any reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the interest of public order.

This right is also preserved by international law, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of which Pakistan is one of the founding signatories. The UDHR, together with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), form the ‘International Bill of Human Rights’ and together enumerate a series of rights, including the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, that call upon state parties to protect, respect and fulfil these rights. Pakistan ratified the ICESCR in 2008 and the ICCPR in 2010, hence undertaking an obligation to bring domestic law related to freedom of peaceful assembly in consonance with international standards and best practices.

This catalogue contains the winning entries of a photo-essay competition instituted by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in 2021 to create greater awareness of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

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For the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), however, it was an exceptionally sad year because of the loss of two formidable colleagues in April. The deaths of vice-chair HRCP Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Kamran Arif and former secretary-general I. A. Rehman left a vacuum in the human rights movement that will be very hard to fill. We also lost two Council members, Zaman Khan and Sindhu Mukesh, in the latter part of the year.

For HRCP, the right to freedom of expression was the most pressing issue of the year, with a direct bearing on all other rights, including press freedom, freedom of assembly and association, parliamentary supremacy and the state of democracy. Crucial violations such as enforced disappearances and police excesses persisted, while the demands of marginalized sections of society were often undermined by constant censorship, tacit or otherwise, and violence against the media. That is why this year’s report has chosen freedom of expression as its overarching theme. It is also why we deemed it fitting to present the Nisar Osmani Award for Courage in Journalism to the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists in 2021.

As with preceding reports, State of Human Rights in 2021 delves into a wide spectrum of human rights violations. Following last year’s pattern, this year’s report comprises separate chapters on the federating units, Islamabad Capital Territory, and the administrative units of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

HRCP was happy to note that both the National Commission for Human Rights and National Commission on the Status of Women had new chairpersons appointed after a gap of several years; we are eager to see both commissions function to full capacity and with the financial autonomy they need. The year also saw some progressive legislation enacted in the federal capital as well as in some provincial assemblies, amid attempts to thwart laws on domestic violence and forced conversions by institutions such as the Council of Islamic Ideology. The Supreme Court ruling against the use of capital punishment for mentally ill prisoners is indeed a huge step forward.

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