A prominent rights group in Pakistan has expressed “considerable alarm” over the state of religious freedom in the country. In its report titled A Breach of Faith: Freedom of Religion or Belief in 2021-22 released on Tuesday, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said incidents of the country’s religious minorities facing persecution remained consistent between July 2021 and June 2022.
The HRCP report focused on forced conversions, the desecration of places of worship belonging to minorities. It also questioned the standardised national curriculum in parts of Pakistan, which the group said has created an “exclusionary narrative that sidelines Pakistan’s religious minorities”.
The report said that in the year 2021 alone, “around 60 cases of forced conversion were reported in the local media, of which 70 percent were girls under the age of 18”, most of them from the Sindh province.
“Unless these measures are implemented urgently, Pakistan will continue to foster a climate of impunity for perpetrators of faith-based discrimination and violence, allowing the already-narrow space for religious freedom to shrink even further,” the HRCP said in its statement.
