Parliamentary panel calls for UK aid to address minority persecution in Pakistan

Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws and militant activities are having a “disproportionate impact” on religious minorities in the Muslim-majority country and a British aid needs to be better targeted towards addressing the issues, a UK parliamentary panel has said in a review on Friday.

The House of Commons International Development Committee said its ‘UK aid to Pakistan’ report has been released in the context of cuts to the overall UK aid budget.

Therefore, it advises that the British government must focus its spending in Pakistan on supporting marginalised groups, including women and girls and religious minorities.

“In 2020, there was an increase in blasphemy charges, with at least 199 people charged,” the report said.

“Shia Muslims, Ahmadi Muslims, Christians, and Hindus were identified as particular targets of the misuse of these laws. Seventy per cent of the 199 cases brought in 2020 were against Shia Muslims, 20 per cent against Ahmadi Muslims, 3.5 per cent against Christians, and 1 per cent against Hindus, indicating the disproportionate impact of these laws on religious minorities, particularly Muslim religious minorities,” it said.

The panel quotes Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, Senior Fellow for South Asia at International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, as explaining that Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan had acknowledged in June 2019 that there were “40 different militant groups operating in Pakistan, with some 40,000 militants in the country”.

“Militant groups and jihadi violence have resulted in Pakistan facing numerous terrorist attacks where the targets of these extremist groups are often religious minorities,” the report said.

Between 2015 and 2019, Pakistan was the largest single recipient of direct UK government-to-government bilateral aid.

However, since then, overall UK aid has been cut from 0.7 per cent of UK national income to 0.5 per cent and aid to Pakistan has been reduced ''dramatically'', according to official estimates.

After experiencing the largest cut in UK aid of any single country, Pakistan fell to seventh in the table of UK recipients, with an annual budget of just less than 200 million pounds (USD 250 million), notes the cross-party International Development Committee – which includes Indian-origin Labour MPs Virendra Sharma and Navendu Mishra among its members.

“My Committee has scrutinised the cuts in the UK aid budget. Bearing the effect of those reductions in mind, we must focus on the effectiveness of our investment in Pakistan,” said Sarah Champion, Labour Party MP and chair of the parliamentary panel.

“The government has repeatedly said that its international aid priority is to improve the situation for women and girls. But in Pakistan those very programmes got less investment. That doesn’t make any sense, even by the Government's own logic. Projects helping women and girls in Pakistan should be bolstered, not cut,” she said.

The committee recommends that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) must direct UK aid spending “in a highly strategic manner” towards programmes to improve the treatment of religious minorities, and back this up with diplomatic action.