ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has consistently failed its religious and ethnic minority communities, like Christians, Hindus, and Ahmadis, to ethnic Pashtuns and Baloch, subjecting them to decades of discrimination, persecution, and violence. Today, this crisis has reached a fever pitch. A sharp rise in human rights abuses against minorities and a recent scandal of brazen election rigging underscore how deeply disenfranchisement has seeped into Pakistani society. Several reports, statements, and firsthand testimonies were shared at the 60th UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) session by victims of state-sponsored atrocities against minorities in Pakistan. Amid a dwindling economy and the growing domination of the military under Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, the country’s so-called democratic institutions have completely eroded, and the common Pakistani now lives the grim reality of injustice and disillusionment.
Religious minorities in Pakistan face systematic persecution and rising violence carried out with impunity. United Nations experts have sounded the alarm over “increasing violence against vulnerable communities on grounds of their religion or belief,” noting that minorities have endured relentless attacks, killings, and unending harassment in recent months. The Ahmadiyya Muslim community has seen an unprecedented surge in targeted persecution. In the past year alone, Ahmadis have suffered killings, arbitrary arrests, and even desecration of their places of worship and cemeteries. As UN experts put it, Pakistan must “break the pattern of impunity” whereby perpetrators of anti-minority violence operate without fear, often with tacit official complicity.
Christians and other non-Muslim minorities suffer similar ordeals. Blasphemy allegations are frequently used to ignite mob violence against Christian neighborhoods. Thousands of Christian residents fled for their lives from different parts of Pakistan in the last few years, especially after the Jaranwala incident in 2023, which led to several follow-up small and large attacks against the community in 2025. Perpetrators are rarely caught, and the judiciary is often in collusion with the intelligence agencies. Amnesty International warns that Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws fuel a cycle of vigilante violence and impunity that “continue to destroy the lives of minority communities.”
Christian and Hindu girls remain “particularly vulnerable” to kidnapping and coerced conversion by extremists, and such cases are too often “validated by the courts” under the guise of religious marriages. UN human rights rapporteurs in 2024 expressed outrage that these “heinous” violations continue unabated, with police often dismissing the crimes as so-called “love marriages,” and they urged Pakistan to finally outlaw child marriage and hold perpetrators accountable. As the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) observes, the “harsh reality” is that the status of all religious minorities has steadily declined in Pakistan.
Ethnic minority communities have likewise borne the brunt of state repression in Pakistan. The country’s 40-million-strong Pashtun community has endured military campaigns and counterterrorism operations that frequently trample human rights. Pashtun activists claim that under the cover of fighting Islamist militants, security forces have carried out extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture of Pashtun civilians for years. The situation is so dire that Pashtun rights advocates took their case to the UN Human Rights Council. At the Council’s June 2025 session, activist Fazal-ur-Rehman Afridi detailed how military aggression, including dozens of aerial drone strikes in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has devastated Pashtun civilians, and how PTM leaders have been detained and tortured for speaking out. Instead of stopping violence, the Pakistan military further increased attacks on the Pashtun community with the recent airstrikes in the Tirah Valley area of KPK, killing over 30 civilians (Pashtuns), mostly women and children.
A similar story unfolds in Balochistan, home to the ethnic Baloch minority, where a decades-long insurgency has been met with brutal state force. Hundreds of Baloch activists and suspected dissidents have “disappeared” or been found dead over the years, and protests by families of the missing are often met with harassment. A UN Special Rapporteur expressed deep concern at reports that police were profiling and threatening the Baloch protesters, calling for fabricated charges to be dropped.
The crisis of human rights in Pakistan is compounded by a parallel assault on democracy itself, culminating in the scandal of the 2024 “rigged” general election. In February 2024, Pakistan held long-delayed general elections, only for credible allegations of widespread manipulation to surface immediately. Then came an extraordinary confession: a senior bureaucrat, the Rawalpindi Commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha, publicly admitted to helping alter the vote counts to convert losing candidates into winners by tens of thousands of votes. Pakistan’s military establishment engineered the outcome in favor of its candidates in the 2024 elections.
The stolen election dealt a further blow to public trust in governance. Pakistan’s own HRCP warned that Chattha’s revelations exposed deep-rooted rot in the system, showing that elements of the state bureaucracy and military subverted the people’s will. In the election’s aftermath, thousands of ordinary Pakistanis took to the streets in more than a dozen cities, claiming their mandate had been robbed. However, the military brutally crushed all protests and violently silenced its critics through arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances. Even before the polls, Field Marshal Munir had waged a relentless crackdown on Imran Khan, arresting his party leaders and supporters and effectively dismantling the party through coercion. Imran Khan, who remains in jail, has bluntly stated that Pakistan is now effectively under overt military rule: “It is completely the establishment…they’re just out in the open [controlling everything],” he said of the generals’ role in the crackdown.
The developments of 2024-2025 paint a bleak picture: Pakistan’s democratic façade is crumbling under the weight of its military’s unchecked power, and its minorities are the first victims of this hybrid “democratic-cum-military” rule. The 60th session of the UN Human Rights Council amplified global concerns that Pakistan’s leadership is fundamentally at odds with the pluralistic, inclusive vision needed to protect its diverse citizenry. Yet on the ground, the military establishment’s grip has only tightened – foreshadowing an even harsher clampdown on dissent and further erosion of minority rights in the days ahead. With Munir and his cadre calling the shots from behind the scenes, there is no hope for any accountability in Pakistan, as military authoritarianism deepens its control in the country.
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