US criticism of human rights “exaggerated”, says minister

The US State Department’s Country Report for Human Rights Practices 2002 for Pakistan is exaggerated, according to the Pakistani information minister. “There have been isolated cases [of abuse], which have been highlighted and blown out of proportion," Sheikh Rashid Ahmad told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad, on Wednesday. The report, published on Monday, stated that Pakistan’s human rights record “remained poor”, and that although there had been improvements, they were in very few areas, and “serious problems remained”. The document said some members of the police had committed many serious rights abuses. “Unlike in previous years, police committed an increased number of extrajudicial killings,” it said. “This is exaggerated, and we know that there is a problem, but not on the scale this report suggests,” Ahmad asserted. Security for minority communities in this Islamic nation was also of great concern, according to the report. “Governmental and societal discrimination against religious minorities, particularly Christians and Ahmadis [members of the Ahmadiya Islamic sect founded in India in 1889], remained a problem, and the government failed to take effective measures to counter prevalent public prejudices against religious minorities,” the report said. But the International Crisis Group (ICG) project director in Islamabad, Samina Ahmed, told IRIN on Wednesday that the State Department report did not go far enough on some issues. “There is mention in the report about the sectarian conflict, but what the report fails to say strongly enough is the fact that the government hasn’t effectively treated [dealt with] extremist groups despite a formal ban on a number of them.” Another issue raised in the report was criticism of the process of returning to civilian rule, following Pakistan’s general election in October 2002. With new changes in the constitution, President Pervez Musharraf and the military continue to dominate politics in the country. “The really important issues that are raised here are the structural issues. First of all is the fact that there hasn’t been a transition of legislative power from the presidency to the legislature and the prime minister. So the transition [to democracy] is incomplete,” Ahmed said. Reference was also made to the situation of women in Pakistan, with the report stating that significant numbers of females had been subjected to rape, violence and other forms of abuse by spouses and others. It said although the government had publicly criticised such acts, incidents were continuing on a regular basis. “Discrimination against women was widespread and traditional social and legal constraints generally kept women in a subordinate position in society,” it stated. In response, the information minister pointed out that Pakistan now had the largest number of women politicians ever seen in the history of the country working for women’s rights. “The work done to improve rights for women over the past few years has been a great achievement,” he added.