Pakistan: Aid Programmes and Human Rights

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the relationship between their aid programmes and human rights and the treatment of minorities in Pakistan, and in particular the case of Asia Bibi.

My Lords, Pakistan’s illustrious and enlightened founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, crafted a constitution which promised to uphold plurality, famously saying:

“You may belong to any religion, caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State”,

and that:

“Minorities, to whichever community they may belong, will be safeguarded. Their religion, faith or belief will be secure. There will be no interference of any kind with their freedom of worship. They will have their protection with regard to their religion, faith, their life and their culture. They will be, in all respects, the citizens of Pakistan without any distinction of caste and creed”.

Tragically, 70 years later, Pakistan’s Ahmadis, Christians, Hindus and minorities, such as the last 4,000 remaining Kalash clinging to a precarious existence in three remote valleys, all face shocking persecution and discrimination.

Last week in Brussels, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, claimed that “individual incidents” of persecution were being whipped up by what he called “western interests”. He said they were comparable to knife crime in London. Try telling that to the two children forced to watch a lynch mob of 1,200 burn their parents alive. Pakistan fails the Jinnah test, not western interests, when no one is brought to justice for the murder of the Christian Minister for Minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti. It fails the Jinnah test when 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are forcibly married and converted. It fails when, in Punjab, Sadaf Masih, a 13 year-old girl, is kidnapped, forcibly converted and married and when, in Sindh, the same thing happened to two Hindu girls. It fails when it ignores the National Action Plan’s requirement to stop anti-Ahmadi sectarian hate propaganda. It fails the Jinnah test when children from minorities are forced to work in brick kilns, workshops, and factories. It fails when Iqbal Masih, an incredibly brave 12 year-old Christian boy, is shot dead for rebelling against enslavement. It fails those minorities who are ghettoised into squalid colonies and forced to clean latrines and sweep streets and, notwithstanding Mr Qureshi’s assertion that “there is no truth” in stories of girls from minorities being sold in faith-led trafficking to Chinese gangs, saying that Pakistan “would never tolerate that”, we have evidence to the contrary.

I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pakistan Minorities and last autumn, with the co-chair, Jim Shannon MP, and Marie Rimmer MP, we heard horrific accounts of abductions, child marriages, rape and forced conversions and saw first-hand the appalling conditions in the apartheid-style “colonies” where many from the minorities are forced to live. We saw families living in hovels with dirt floors, in shacks without running water or electricity, with little education or health provision and in squalid and primitive conditions, all completely off the DfID radar. Thousands upon thousands of people are condemned to lives of destitution and misery. This left-over from the caste system is graphically illustrated by the case of a boy beaten and excluded from school for touching a water tap. Untouchability remains a curse.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this important debate before us today and for his dedication to bringing injustices across the world before your Lordships’ House.

At the heart of all we do as part of our important role as an international aid superpower must be constant self-evaluation to ensure that our aid programmes are achieving results in the context of each state that we help. At the same time, we must be aware of the important soft power that international aid allows us in improving lives for everyone in any state we help, including minorities. How to ensure that aid is concentrated on those who really need it in any state is a significant debate within the international aid community. This applies especially to minorities, who are often among the most marginalised in any society.

I do not want to repeat in this short contribution the powerful evidence that we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and, as has been identified by the Foreign Office, that Pakistan is currently woeful in its treatment of minorities. From state-sponsored blasphemy laws to the death penalty, we see how a state creates an easy mechanism for the persecution of religious minorities, especially Christians and Hindus.

In Pakistan, most of these minorities are among the third of the population who live in poverty and who should be the very people benefiting from our aid programmes. At the same time, Pakistan is of course an important strategic partner for the UK and a state that receives significant support in aid—more than £300 million in 2019-20. The reassurances that I seek from the Minister are around the direction of that aid.

I applaud the focusing of UK international development on education, especially for girls in Pakistan, to ensure they have as many opportunities as possible. I would hope that an educated population would by its nature become more pluralistic and less susceptible to the persecution of minorities in these difficult times. I want to ask the Minister about three specific issues.

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, to whom I pay great tribute for securing this debate, I believe that there was a strong case for Asia Bibi and her household to have been offered asylum by Her Majesty's Government. In my contact with the family spokesperson, he was clear that the UK was their preferred destination.

I am troubled by how parliamentarians can hold the Government to account in cases such as this when we are told that live cases are not open to discussion. That sense of dis-ease is reinforced by the absence of evidence of diplomatic activity in the Asia Bibi case before it became an international news story.

Last week, I was speaking to a bishop from south Punjab, who said, “There are many Asia Bibis here”. There are many, too, in interior Sindh who suffer similar plights but do so hidden from the world’s media and Governments, their cases not reported. He described the spectre of blasphemy charges hanging over Hindu and Christian families who speak out against injustice or crime. He spoke of Christian girls being abducted into sexual slavery—in a way which we have already heard about—and then forced to convert, their families powerless to defend them because of the threat of the abuse of blasphemy laws.

The bishop’s deepest concerns—and it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord McInnes—were about the effective denial of education for many children from religious minorities, causing them to descend deeper into permanent spirals of poverty and depression. His account was a graphic illustration of the findings of the 2018 CSW report, which tells of bias, discrimination and abuse undermining the constitutional commitments of the Pakistani Government regardless of religion or caste.

DfID is doing much good work in supporting the general aspirations of the Pakistani Government, but I am not yet persuaded that mechanisms are in place to ensure that our aid is addressing the concerns of the bishop and his people and the noble Lord, Lord McInnes, and the needs of other minority people in south Punjab. The ePact evaluation of phase 2 of the Punjab education sector programme deems:

“Inequities in educational access and attainment are persisting”.

It recommends both that equity of access, including socioeconomic status, disability and gender, are mainstreamed and that systems are devised for assessing the success in doing so. Will this advice be applied to future DfID programmes? Does the Minister agree that that task cannot be done without building in some element of minority community criteria? Is the current programme hitting the spot?

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this debate. Pakistan is a big country with a population of 200 million people. Minorities, including Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and others constitute about 3.5% of the total population of the country. There are several hundred places of worship across Pakistan that belong to various religious minorities. Various articles in the constitution of Pakistan, such as Articles 20, 21, 22, 26, 27 and 28, accord rights to minorities as equal citizens of the country, free to profess their religions and visit their places of worship.

Minorities have visible representation in the parliamentary set-up of Pakistan. There are special reserved seats for minorities in all houses of representatives: four seats in the Pakistan Senate, 10 in the National Assembly, and eight in the Punjab, nine in the Sindh and three each in the Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies. On top of that, minorities are free to stand in any elections as citizens of Pakistan, and they do get elected.

It is important to mention here that there is a 5% jobs quota in the public sector in Pakistan allocated to the minority communities, which constitute only 3.5% of the total population of the country. Furthermore, 11 August is observed as Minorities Day. There is a special ministry at the federal level, called the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Inter-faith Harmony, which looks after minorities’ rights in the country.

Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in Pakistan. It arouses sentiments among the general populace that have led to death and destruction in Pakistan, sadly. Many in Pakistan believe that their country’s blasphemy law is misunderstood, as if it protects only Muslims. In reality, however, it protects all Pakistanis equally. According to the official figures, the majority, 95%, of those accused under the blasphemy law are Muslims. The maximum penalty under the blasphemy law is death but, as I understand, no one has ever been executed by a court of law under this section. I stand to be corrected.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for securing this important debate. As he emphasised, the brutal application of sharia law, in conjunction with the failure of the authorities to ensure due legal process, has resulted in horrendous violence. Blasphemy laws have been used by extremists as a pretext for murder. Young girls have been abducted and forced to change their religion or have been forced into marriage. Others are in prison or have been sentenced to death for apostasy.

Countless families have been forced to leave their homeland. For example, as my noble friend said, thousands of Christians have sought asylum in Thailand. They arrive in Bangkok on cheap tourist visas, but as soon as their visa expires they are technically classified as illegal aliens and are subject to arrest and detention in horrendous conditions. Given the plight of Pakistani refugees in Thailand, have Her Majesty’s Government raised concerns with UNHCR about the failure to resettle them in safe countries?

I had the painful privilege of meeting some of the families who had escaped to Bangkok. I sat and wept with those who have endured horrendous suffering. One man, called Cale, was accused of blasphemy in Pakistan. He described how he was arrested by the police and taken to a remote location where he was tortured, hanged upside down, shackled and beaten for seven days. After a month in prison he was cleared of the charges, yet the local mob wanted to kill him. He told me, “They want to punish me with a very painful death such as no one has ever seen before. They want to kill me in a way that the Christian community will always remember”.

I also met a courageous man called Hosea. He was kidnapped by a mob in Pakistan for being an apostate. The mob shackled him with metal chains and attempted to amputate his leg. He eventually escaped with his wife to Thailand, but his relatives in Pakistan are still in danger. He told me, weeping: “Even last week my brother and my 16 month-old nephew were taken captive. They grabbed the baby, repeatedly smashed him into a wall and demanded to know my whereabouts”.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on securing this important debate, and pay tribute to the wonderful work that he does in the field of human rights.

When India was partitioned in 1947, as we have heard, the founding father of the new state of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, then terminally ill, said that it would be a country that respected all its minorities. He did not live to see his hope tragically ignored. A rigid and intolerant form of Islam, Wahhabism, funded by Saudi dollars, now pervades the country.

Strict blasphemy laws are used to prevent open discussion of religion, and the death penalty can apply to Muslims who try to convert to a different faith. As we have heard, a convert to Christianity, Asia Bibi, sentenced to death for alleged blasphemy, spent nine years on death row before eventually being allowed to flee to Canada. Others have not been so fortunate. In one case, children were made to watch as their parents were burnt alive in a brick kiln. Minorities are frequently allocated menial tasks such as the cleaning of public latrines. Homes of minorities are frequently attacked and women and girls kidnapped and converted or sold into slavery.

I have at times questioned the appropriateness of Pakistan, with its ill treatment of minorities, still being a member of the Commonwealth, a club of countries with historic ties to Britain. Members are required to abide by the Commonwealth charter, with core values of opposition to,

“all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds”.

By any measure, there is a clear case for expelling Pakistan from the Commonwealth, but this will not help its suffering minorities and could make their plight worse. The way forward is to look beyond charters and lofty declarations to clear targets and measures of performance for all erring members—Pakistan is by no means the only one—to nudge them to respect human rights. We must also target aid to specific projects geared to fight religious bigotry and prejudice.

My Lords, I was talking recently to a distinguished Pakistan citizen, with businesses around the world. I asked him what life was like in Pakistan at the moment. “Just like here”, he said. “Really” I said, “what about the blasphemy law, and the people suffering under it”? “Oh”, he said, with a rather dismissive wave of the hand, “It’s the uneducated people in the villages”. I am afraid it is all too easy for the elites, whether in Pakistan or this country, to live in an environment divorced from the reality of life for so many. The fact is that the blasphemy law in Pakistan is blighting the lives of countless people, causing apprehension, anxiety and in some cases imprisonment and death. Too many, like the government Minister mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, live in a cocooned world of their own and have shut their eyes to what is happening in the countryside.

As we know, Pakistan is a country with a number of minority groups. Between 0.22% and 2.2% of the population are Ahmadiyya Muslims, although they are actually forbidden by law from even describing themselves as Muslims. Some 2.6% of the population are Christian, about 2.5 million in all.

Between 1987 and 2017, 1,500 people or more were charged with blasphemy: 730 were Muslims, 501 were Ahmadis, 205 were Christians and 26 were Hindus. Although, as the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, said, no judicial executions have yet taken place, at least 75 people involved in accusations of blasphemy were murdered before their trials were over, and as we have heard, prominent figures who opposed the blasphemy law have been assassinated. It is this mob violence, so vividly brought home by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, which is so frightening. It affects not just the accused and their family but anyone who stands up for them, especially any lawyer or judge.

We rejoice that Asia Bidi is now safe and in Canada with her family, but we cannot forget the suffering that she had in the years before. We cannot forget that the Minister for Minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, who spoke against the blasphemy law, was assassinated as a result. We know that the blasphemy law is being used to settle grievances and vendettas in villages. We look to the elite in Pakistan to open their eyes to what is happening. It is quite wrong for successive Governments to refuse to stand up to religious extremism and intimidation. In negotiations about aid, we look to the British Government to make it quite clear that this law causes untold suffering and is totally unacceptable. I hope that the Minister will take from this debate a clear message that aid needs to be directed towards minorities.

My Lords, I accept and respect everyone, irrespective of race, colour, creed or caste; I have been brought up in a multiracial community. I have been concerned about the persecution of Christians and other minority groups in different parts of the world, including Pakistan. I have met Muslim and non-Muslim leaders and spoken on this issue at several meetings. I am looking forward to the Bishop of Truro’s final report. I am in touch with the Pakistani high commissioner, who has taken numerous initiatives towards promoting interfaith harmony.

The rights of minorities are protected under the constitution of Pakistan. Articles 33, 36 and 37 provide legal protection to minorities. The Pakistani Government have established legislative measures that promote and protect minorities’ rights. There is political will on the part of Pakistan’s Government to improve the position regarding the rights of minorities. As far as Christians are concerned, Islam considers them as people of the Book, and the Books of Allah include the Holy Koran, the Torah, the Gospel of Jesus and the Psalms of David. It would therefore be wrong to subject Christians to any discrimination.

The problem unfortunately is with certain religious and community leaders who are insular and have their own agenda. It is necessary therefore to change the culture and attitude of these people, and we need to support Pakistan in this regard. I met Dr Shoaib Suddle in the House of Lords following his appointment as the chair of a commission for minority religious equalities. He personally reached out and briefed me and other partners in the UK, earning our support for his proposed activities. He has a long-term programme of work, which will include implementing reforms for the freedom and protection of minorities in Pakistan. This will be consistent with words spoken by Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah in his speech on 11 August 1947:

“You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan ... We are all … equal citizens”,

as a nation in the state of Pakistan. I very much hope that this vision is now achieved.