Pakistan should improve its human-rights record. It should protect journalists, women, workers, religious minorities and political opponents because they are Pakistani citizens, not because a European official has placed another report on a desk in Brussels.
There should be no confusion on this point.
There should also be no confusion about the other point: Europe cannot behave like the permanent examiner of the world while refusing to sit the same examination itself.
Pakistan’s record is imperfect, but it is not the caricature routinely painted abroad.
The European Commission’s latest GSP+ assessment has revived the familiar debate about Pakistan’s compliance with international conventions. Some of the concerns are valid. Laws are often enacted with great ceremony and implemented with very little seriousness. Labour inspectors remain weak, cases of violence against women drag on, minorities continue to face discrimination and restrictions on expression have damaged Pakistan’s democratic standing.
A patriotic Pakistani does not deny these problems. He asks why they have not been corrected.
Yet patriotism also requires asking why the European conscience becomes so alert in Islamabad, Dhaka or Ankara and so conveniently drowsy in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw or Gaza.
Let us begin with the economic facts.
Pakistan remains the largest beneficiary of the European Union’s GSP+ arrangement. In 2024, Pakistani exports worth €7.482bn qualified for preferential access. Exporters successfully used those concessions on goods worth €7.115bn, producing an extraordinary utilisation rate of 95.1pc. Pakistan received an estimated €732m in tariff relief, while the EU absorbed around 28pc of the country’s exports.
Pakistani exports to Europe have more than doubled since the scheme began in 2014. The arrangement has therefore worked for Pakistan, though Europe has hardly been doing charity. European consumers receive competitively priced garments, home textiles, leather goods and sporting products. European importers earn profits. Pakistan receives market access. Both sides benefit.
Pakistan should meet the conditions because it accepted them voluntarily and because most of the required reforms are good for Pakistan itself.
But Brussels should spare us the fiction that human rights are always measured without political calculation.
Pakistan is judged against 27 international conventions. Its failures are catalogued, its laws examined and its institutions placed under a microscope. Fair enough. Where is the corresponding report on the treatment of Muslims inside Europe?
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 47pc of Muslims surveyed had experienced racial discrimination during the previous five years. The figure was 39pc in the earlier survey. Among Muslim women wearing religious clothing, 45pc faced discrimination while seeking employment. For younger women, the rate climbed even higher.
What should this be called?
If a Muslim woman is denied work because she wears a headscarf in Europe, is that religious freedom?
France has restricted Islamic clothing in schools. Several European states have imposed bans on the face veil. Mosques have been attacked. Copies of the Holy Quran have been desecrated under police protection. Political parties that build campaigns around fear of Muslims have entered parliaments and governments.
European officials condemn Islamophobia in carefully drafted statements. Their political systems continue to reward it at the ballot box.
Pakistan’s record is imperfect, but it is not the caricature routinely painted abroad. The Constitution guarantees religious freedom. Churches operate in Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi and elsewhere. Hindu temples continue to function. Sikh pilgrims visit some of their holiest sites under arrangements Pakistan has expanded despite its hostile relationship with India. The Kartarpur Corridor remains one of South Asia’s most important examples of religious facilitation.
Pakistan has also introduced reforms that deserve recognition.
It has adopted rules under its anti-torture legislation, ratified the ILO protocol against forced labour, strengthened the statutory basis of the National Commission for Human Rights and passed new measures concerning child marriage and minority rights. The NCHR has retained international ‘A-status’ accreditation and has intervened in cases involving forced conversion, child abuse, violence against women and discrimination.
Implementation remains the weak link. That criticism is justified.
What is not justified is a reporting culture in which every Pakistani reform is placed in a footnote while every allegation becomes a headline.
International reports depend heavily on submissions by non-governmental organisations. Civil society performs an essential function, particularly where governments conceal abuses. But treating every official statement as propaganda and every activist statement as unquestionable truth is not investigation. It is prejudice wearing the clothes of scholarship.
Europe’s handling of migration further weakens its claim to occupy the moral high ground. Thousands of people have died or disappeared while attempting to cross the Mediterranean and Atlantic routes towards European shores.
Europe has the right to protect its borders. It does not have the right to pretend that people drowning outside those borders have ceased to possess human rights.
And then there is Gaza.
Europe has produced statements, expressed concern and called for restraint. Meanwhile, Gaza has been flattened, tens of thousands have been killed, hospitals and universities have been destroyed, and an entire population has been pushed towards hunger and displacement.
Some European governments continued supplying arms to Israel while simultaneously lecturing developing countries about international humanitarian law. Apparently, the sanctity of civilian life changes according to the identity of the victim and the strategic value of the state dropping the bombs. Pakistan should not respond by rejecting GSP+ or dismissing every criticism as a conspiracy. That would be foolish and economically self-destructive. Europe is Pakistan’s largest export market, and millions of livelihoods are linked directly or indirectly to preferential access.
Islamabad should instead prepare a stronger case. It should strengthen the NCHR and provincial human-rights bodies. It should protect journalists and ensure that laws passed in parliament operate outside parliament as well. Pakistan’s answer to selective criticism should be better performance, better evidence and firmer diplomacy. The government must also stop approaching GSP+ like a nervous student awaiting the examiner’s mercy. Pakistan is a commercial partner. Its exporters make highly effective use of the facility, with a utilisation rate exceeding 95pc. European businesses and consumers benefit from the arrangement. Islamabad should therefore engage confidently, answer legitimate concerns and challenge distorted conclusions.
The European Union, in turn, must decide whether human rights are universal principles or instruments to be used against weaker states.
Human rights belong neither to Brussels nor to Islamabad. They belong to human beings.
The writer is a freelance columnist.