World Report 2025: Pakistan

Summary

Human Rights Watch's annual review of human rights in Pakistan covers the events of 2024. It finds that the government formed after the February 2024 general elections continued its predecessor's crackdown on free expression and civil society, that blasphemy-related violence against religious minorities intensified, and that rising attacks by Islamist militants gave the authorities a pretext to step up their campaign to push Afghan refugees out of the country.

On freedom of expression, the report says the authorities' widespread clampdown on expression and association marred the elections. Social media platforms, including X, were intermittently blocked throughout the year, and hundreds of activists were detained, some on charges of using violence. Journalists faced intimidation, harassment, and digital and physical surveillance for perceived criticism of the government, creating a climate of fear in which many resorted to self-censorship.

Journalists were also killed in 2024, some allegedly by militant groups, and others were victims of apparent enforced disappearances, including the poet Syed Farhad Ali Shah (Ahmad Farhad), who was abducted from his home in May. In February, the Federal Investigation Agency arrested the digital journalist Asad Ali Toor over an alleged "campaign" against Supreme Court judges. In June, the Punjab government enacted what Human Rights Watch calls a vague and overbroad defamation law that applies to social media posts as well as conventional media, lets claimants start proceedings "without proof of actual damage or loss," and imposes heavy penalties without independent tribunals or due process. Politicians and journalists were charged under the colonial-era sedition law.

The report describes the trial of civilians in military courts as a violation of international law. Military courts sentenced 60 civilians to between two and ten years in prison over attacks on military installations that followed Imran Khan's arrest in May 2023, in secret proceedings that denied defendants due process.

On freedom of religion, Human Rights Watch says the blasphemy laws provided a pretext for violence against religious minorities and left them vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and prosecution. Mob and vigilante attacks over alleged blasphemy killed four people in 2024, and the government failed to hold the perpetrators accountable. Members of the Ahmadiyya community remained a major target of prosecutions under the blasphemy laws and the specific anti-Ahmadi provisions of the penal code, as well as of militant groups and the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan party.

The chapter also documents attacks by militant groups including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Islamic State of Khorasan Province and the Balochistan Liberation Army; the detention of people taking part in the Baloch National Gathering in July; and the pressure on Afghans, more than 220,000 of whom had returned to Afghanistan by September 2024, most citing fear of arrest. It closes with the effects of the economic crisis and IMF-linked austerity, violence against women and girls, child marriage, and abuses against transgender people.

Summary written by a Silenced editor from the report itself (467 words). Quotes and figures are the report's; read the full report for its sources and context.