The human rights story Geneva must hear

Geneva has once again become one of the principal arenas in which countries are judged, defended and, at times, politically targeted in the name of human rights. The 63rd regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council opened at the Palais des Nations on 7 September 2026 and runs until 7 October. Alongside it, advocacy groups and their sponsors hold side events that shape the wider conversation, and Pakistan will feature in it. There is nothing wrong with scrutiny. Every state that accepts human rights obligations must accept questions about its performance, and Pakistan has challenges of its own. The difficulty arises when scrutiny becomes selective, when progress is ignored, and when isolated incidents are cast as the whole story of a nation of 240 million. So Pakistan should speak in Geneva with confidence, through facts rather than slogans. Those facts begin with the constitutional order, which guarantees every citizen the right to profess, practise and propagate religion. The principle was set out by Quaid e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who told the Constituent Assembly in 1947 that citizens were free to go to their temples and mosques alike, and that a person's faith was not the business of the state. The real question is whether that principle has been built into institutions. Increasingly, it has. Consider representation. Religious minorities hold reserved seats in the Senate, the National Assembly and every provincial assembly, and a five per cent quota in federal service operates alongside open merit. The state concedes the quota is not yet met in full, held back partly by gaps in education, and that candour is a strength, not a weakness. In the classroom, the Single National Curriculum now includes dedicated religious instruction for seven non-Muslim communities, developed with scholars of each faith. The institutional machinery has advanced sharply of late. In December 2025 Parliament enacted the National Commission for Minorities Rights Act, placing a dedicated minority rights body on a statutory footing for the first time. The bill passed a joint sitting on 2 December and received assent on 17 December, answering a Supreme Court direction from 2014. Its passage was contested and some provisions trimmed, but an Act of Parliament, unlike an executive notification a later government can quietly withdraw, is a genuine advance. Months earlier, in March 2025, the Federal Cabinet approved a Policy on Interfaith Harmony and a companion Strategy of Religious Tolerance, candid documents naming discrimination and violence against religious communities as unsolved problems. Nothing captures this better than the Kartarpur Corridor, which gave Sikh pilgrims worldwide access to one of their holiest sites across one of the world's hardest borders. Pakistan hosted the 550th birth anniversary of Baba Guru Nanak, has received tens of thousands of pilgrims, maintains Sikh and Hindu shrines, and has embraced its Gandhara Buddhist heritage as part of the national story. Governments that fear their minorities do not build doors for them. On forced conversion, the answer has been legislative: the Hindu Marriage Act of 2017 and Sindh's own law codified and protected Hindu marriages, with safeguards for Hindu women, and Punjab became the first province to let Sikhs register marriages under their tradition. Where violence has struck, as in the target killings of Sikhs in Peshawar, the response has been arrests, surveillance and grassroots protection: the Counter Terrorism Department detained former Daesh operatives accused of the targeting, and quick reaction task forces and a district level One Man Commission under Dr Shoaib Suddle now handle minority grievances. Then there is the charge levelled most often, that the blasphemy law is a weapon trained on minorities. The convictions say otherwise. According to official figures, of the 61 people convicted of blasphemy offences since 2005, roughly four in five were Muslims, not members of minority faiths, and of the cases now under trial only about 11 per cent involve non-Muslims. Where minorities have been wrongly accused, the higher judiciary has repeatedly set the record straight, from Asia Bibi to Shafqat Emmanuel and the Hindu teacher Notan Lal. A law misapplied is a problem of enforcement to be fixed. A law aimed at minorities would not convict the majority four times out of five. Pakistan is also entitled to a larger point: human rights cannot keep their universal legitimacy if applied selectively, yet outrage over a given crisis often varies with geopolitical alignment. Pakistan should argue for universality, not immunity. The rights of a Christian in Pakistan matter, and so do those of a Muslim in Europe, of Palestinians and of Kashmiris. The nationality or political usefulness of a victim should never set the value of their rights, and that standard should apply in Geneva to everyone, Pakistan included. Pakistan should own a weakness, too: it has been poor at explaining itself. Reforms pass with little outreach while hostile narratives are repeated relentlessly, and an empty space is quickly filled by someone else. Pakistan needs a permanent approach to human rights diplomacy in which its own Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Parsi and Kalash citizens are visible participants, because their voices carry an authority no official statement can match. Pakistan does not need to claim perfection. It needs to demand accuracy. There are challenges within the country, and the state should keep working at them, but the world should weigh the whole ledger: constitutional protection for religious freedom, reserved representation, a statutory minorities commission, a national interfaith policy, codified marriage laws, and the opening of Kartarpur. These are not abstractions. They are laws and institutions, each with a date attached. Pakistan's human rights story is unfinished, but unfinished is not the same as nonexistent. The task for Geneva is simple: judge Pakistan fairly, critically where criticism is deserved, and by the same standard applied to everyone else. Pakistan does not need special treatment. It needs an honest hearing.