On April 28, 2026, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif inaugurated the first-ever High-Level EU-Pakistan Business Forum at Islamabad’s Serena Hotel, drawing more than 1,000 European and Pakistani policymakers, financiers, and executives around a single proposition: that Pakistan is no longer a market to be hedged but a partner to be courted.

Officials reminded the room that the European Union has become Pakistan’s second-largest trading partner, absorbing some €12 billion in bilateral goods trade in 2024, and that exports to the bloc have grown by more than 90 per cent since the country was admitted to the GSP+ scheme in 2014. The forum, in the words of one observer, was “a strategic declaration.”

Six days earlier, on April 22, an entirely different declaration had been issued from Geneva. A group of United Nations human rights experts sounded an alarm over what they described as the “ongoing and widespread” abduction and forced religious conversion of women and girls from Pakistan’s minority communities.

The findings were stark. Of the documented cases of forced conversion through marriage in 2025, seventy-five per cent of the victims were Hindu, twenty-five per cent Christian. Roughly eighty per cent of cases were registered in Sindh. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimates that more than twenty girls a month are subjected to such abuse, with the actual figure almost certainly higher because of barriers to reporting.

These two declarations belong, in theory, to the same Pakistan. In practice, they describe two countries.

The contradiction matters because the GSP+ regime is not, and has never been, a unilateral gift. The duty-free access that has driven a 108 per cent rise in Pakistan’s exports to Europe over the past decade is conditional on the ratification and effective implementation of 27 international conventions covering human rights, labour standards, environmental protection and good governance.

With the upcoming mid-2026 GSP+ assessment and the transition to a new EU preferences scheme from 2027, the question European institutions will ask is no longer whether Pakistan has signed the conventions; it is whether Pakistani citizens, especially the most vulnerable, can actually invoke them.

A commission that is not feared is precisely the kind of commission a perpetrator in interior Sindh needs not factor into his calculations at all

It is here that the country’s recent legislative record begins to look less reassuring than the speeches at the Serena Hotel suggested.

When I wrote in these pages in August 2023 about the National Assembly’s passage of a bill to establish a National Commission for Minorities, I argued that the proposed body, endowed with administrative and financial autonomy and the power to investigate violations, could become a “formidable instrumentality” for the protection of non-Muslim citizens. Almost three years later, the gap between that draft and the law that finally arrived is the gap this column is concerned with.

After the President returned an earlier version of the bill without assent, a revised text was passed by a joint sitting of Parliament on December 2, 2025, by 160 votes to 79, and signed into law on December 17, 2025, as the National Commission for Minorities Rights Act, 2025. The Pakistan Bishops’ Conference, the Christian Daily and Pakistani human rights organisations welcomed it in principle and rightly so, given that the Supreme Court had ordered a similar body in its 2014 Jillani judgment and the country had then waited eleven years.

But welcome in principle is not the same as welcome in detail. As rights advocates were quick to note, the version that became law was stripped of key investigative and enforcement powers that the earlier draft had contained. The Commission can advise; it can monitor; it can recommend. What it cannot meaningfully do is summon, compel, prosecute or penalise.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, while welcoming the legislation, pointedly emphasised that the Commission’s mandate must “align strictly with constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion or belief and non-discrimination for all minority citizens” — a polite way of registering concern that the body, as constituted, may not be capable of doing so.

A commission that cannot investigate is, in the Pakistani institutional landscape, a commission that will not be feared. And a commission that is not feared is precisely the kind of commission a perpetrator in interior Sindh needs not factor into his calculations at all.

Where The Statute Meets The Street

Consider how the law actually intersects with the lives it is meant to protect. The Sindh Child Marriages Restraint Act, 2013 sets the legal age of marriage at 18 for both sexes — among the most progressive provisions of its kind in the country, and one to which the Pakistan Today coverage of the EU forum explicitly pointed as evidence of reform. Punjab has now followed, criminalising child marriage under 18 in legislation that TFT contributors have welcomed.

Yet a United Nations expert panel was driven to point out, only days ago, that adolescent girls between 14 and 18 remain the primary targets of conversion-cum-marriage, that some victims are younger still, and that courts have repeatedly accepted “dubious marriage and conversion documentation, even where contradicted by official records.”

 A commission designed only to issue reports is, in effect, an in-house auditor for grievances that the state already has every reason to publicise

The implication is uncomfortable but inescapable: Pakistan does not, in 2026, lack laws against the abduction of minor girls. It lacks the institutional architecture to enforce them when those minors happen to be Hindu, Christian or Sikh, and when the perpetrator can produce a conversion certificate from a sympathetic shrine. A Sindh Assembly bill that would have explicitly criminalised forced conversion was rejected in 2016 under pressure from religious parties and has never been revived. The federal Commission, as now legislated, has no power to fill that void.

This is the credibility gap that European investors and the European Commission will eventually price in, even if they did not raise it from the dais this week. The same Eurasia Review analysis that praised the forum noted that “global narratives affect investment” and that the role of Pakistan should be to “tackle real issues with the institutions, due process and transparency.” Trade preferences are not extended to states that file good reports; they are extended to states whose citizens can file complaints.

What, then, would a serious response look like?

First, the National Commission for Minorities Rights Act should be amended at the next available legislative window to restore investigative authority, including the power to summon witnesses, requisition records from law-enforcement agencies, and refer cases of obstruction to the High Courts. A commission designed only to issue reports is, in effect, an in-house auditor for grievances that the state already has every reason to publicise.

Second, the federal government should table, and the provinces should pass, a uniform statute criminalising forced religious conversion as a distinct offence, with a strict procedural rule that any conversion contracted by a person below the age of 18, or within ninety days of an alleged marriage, is presumptively void. This is precisely what United Nations experts explicitly recommended on April 22, and it is the legislative equivalent of moving from a slogan to a sanction.

Third, first information report-friendly police protocols, mandatory age verification through National Database and Registration Authority records, and dedicated minority desks at district police stations are not glamorous reforms, but they are the reforms most likely to register on a GSP+ compliance review. Where the state already has machinery, what is required is the political will to use it without sectarian discount.

None of this implies that the recent reforms are worthless. The Commission, even in its diluted form, gives Pakistani minorities a statutory address they did not previously have. The Sindh and Punjab child-marriage laws are real laws. The 27 GSP+ conventions are not Potemkin signatures; many of them have produced concrete improvements in workplace safety, environmental regulation, and women’s labour rights. The point is rather that the country whose minister stands at Serena Hotel and the country whose adolescent Hindu daughters are being trafficked through provincial shrines must, finally, become the same country.

In a 2014 judgment that ordered the very Commission Pakistan has just legislated, Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani warned that “tolerance is the bedrock of any civilised society.” Twelve years later, with Brussels watching and Sindh’s own daughters disappearing at the rate of more than twenty a month, the bedrock is showing cracks not only in spiritual terms but in commercial ones.

As Amartya Sen reminded a generation of policymakers, development is not what governments deliver to citizens; it is the freedom citizens are able to exercise. By that measure, Pakistan’s moment in the sun will only last as long as its minorities are permitted to stand in it.