Pakistan: Aid Programmes and Human Rights

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

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.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

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.

As I asked on Saturday in a letter to the Foreign Secretary, if Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge are to visit Pakistan, will they be visiting one of these colonies and meeting the minorities? Perhaps the Minister can tell us.

There is an old Punjabi saying that he who has not visited Lahore has not lived but, despite its Mogul glories, this is where, in 2016, 75 people, mainly women and children, were killed and more than 340 were injured while celebrating Easter in Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park.

Beyond the killings, everything is stacked against the minorities. Take the case of Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian woman who was incarcerated for nine years, sentenced to death for so-called blasphemy. In Islamabad, members of the Supreme Court promised our group that Asia Bibi’s case would finally go to appeal, and to their great credit they bravely defied rioters and lynch mobs. She was finally allowed to travel to Canada, although sadly the UK failed to take her. Do not underestimate the bravery of those judges. When Shahbaz Bhatti and his friend Salman Taseer, the Muslim governor of the Punjab, spoke up for Asia Bibi and called for reforms to the blasphemy laws, both men were murdered. Conversely, Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered Taseer, has been lionised and idolised as a hero.

Asia’s case is only one of many. Asia’s cell in the prison at Multan is already occupied by Shagufta Kauser, another illiterate Christian woman. She and her disabled husband, both unable to read or write, face execution for allegedly sending blasphemous texts in English. By some estimates, more than 70 people are currently on death row for alleged blasphemy crimes. What recent representations have we made about Shagufta Kauser and the need to reform laws that frequently target minorities?

In 2016, after seeing fleeing Christians and Ahmadis caged like animals in detention centres, which my noble friend Lady Cox has also visited, I chaired an inquiry on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, who is here today. Our report catalogued systematic persecution and the failure of Home Office country guidance to recognise the nature of this persecution. We concluded that,

“we need to dispense with the fiction that the … minorities are treated fairly and justly. There is outright persecution and we should not hesitate in saying so”.

Following the Sri Lanka Easter bombings, some of those escapees now face even greater danger. In 2016 we recommended that Home Office interviewers, caseworkers and presenting officers needed better training in understanding that persecution. The report also urged DfID to ensure that overseas aid is provided in Pakistan only to recipients able to demonstrate their commitment to upholding Pakistan’s international human rights obligations, not least Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to believe, not to believe, or to change your belief.

Over the past decade, £2.6 billion of British aid has poured into Pakistan—on average, that is £383,000 every single day—but failure to differentiate how and where we spend that money leads DfID to say that it has no idea how much of the aid reaches these destitute, desperate minorities. Disturbingly, last week the National Audit Office, after highlighting an example from Pakistan, said that,

“overall government is not in a position to be confident that the portfolio in its totality is securing value for money”.

I welcome the decision last week of the International Development Committee of the House of Commons to conduct an inquiry into British aid to Pakistan. It should also look at the work of Professor Brian Grim on 173 countries, which found that where minorities are respected and religious freedom upheld, that,

“contributes to better economic and business outcomes”,

and to,

“successful and sustainable enterprises that benefit societies and individuals”.

I hope that new Ministers in the department will reassess how DfID spends UK money, why it does not target beleaguered minorities and why it is not made conditional on the removal of hate material from school textbooks and discriminatory adverts reserving menial jobs for minorities. I hope they will insist that the provision of an affirmative action programme, endorsed by the constitution, is implemented.

Pakistan must challenge forced conversions, forced marriage and the prevailing culture of impunity. I took evidence from a man who had escaped from Pakistan who had seen another man and his family burned alive. That man went to the police, who in turn informed the assailants, having told him that he would be next. He and his young family fled the country.

Our all-party group has also been told of widespread and systematic police brutality and torture. We were told about the beatings of victims who were hung by their arms or feet for hours on end, forced to witness the torture of others and, in some cases, stripped naked and paraded in public. Such brutal treatment needs to be investigated by an independent, autonomous national commission for minorities such as that proposed by Pakistan’s Supreme Court in 2014 and established in accordance with the Paris principles.

When the Minister replies to our welcome debate, I hope that we will hear how our Government will work to make these things happen and to create the kind of society envisaged by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where Pakistan’s beleaguered minorities are at last treated with respect as equals and fellow citizens. I thank all noble Lords who are participating in today’s short but welcome debate.