A US panel on religious freedom has said the treatment of minorities in Pakistan and India is deteriorating, and it recommended sanctions be imposed on the former’s officials and government agencies and the latter’s external spy agency over its alleged involvement in plots to assassinate Sikh separatists.
The commission is a bipartisan US government advisory body that monitors religious freedom abroad and makes policy recommendations.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said, in its annual report, “In 2024, religious freedom conditions in Pakistan continued to deteriorate. Religious minority communities — particularly Christians, Hindus and Shia [Muslims] and [Ahmadis] — continued to bear the brunt of persecution and prosecutions under Pakistan’s strict blasphemy law and to suffer violence from both the police and mobs, while those responsible for such violence rarely faced legal consequences. Such conditions continued to contribute to a worsening religious and political climate of fear, intolerance, and violence.”
The report released on Tuesday pointed out that accusations of blasphemy and subsequent mob violence continued to severely impact religious minority communities in the country, as it listed several incidents in the last year.
It also noted that “violent attacks and systematic harassment” against the Ahmadi community persisted throughout the year, resulting in four deaths in total.Another issue highlighted was the “worsening pattern of forced conversions” among the country’s Christian and Hindu women and girls.“
The commission recommended that the US administration “impose targeted sanctions on Pakistani officials and government agencies responsible for severe violations of religious freedom” by freezing those individuals’ assets and/or barring their entry into the US under human rights-related financial and visa authorities, citing specific religious freedom violations.
The panel recommended that Pakistan should be redesignated as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) for engaging in “systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom”, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).
