PHRG mission to Pakistan

Following a meeting at the Foreign Office on Monday, the Parliamentary Human Rights Group mission to Pakistan to investigate the treatment of minority religious communities is going ahead. Although the government has undertaken to address these problems, it provides them with no protection against incitement to religious hatred, and the laws that discriminate against particular minorities encourage a societal attitude of intolerance. Among the many submissions to the UN's Universal Periodic Review of Pakistan on the parlous condition of the minorities, it was stated that "Violence and discrimination by Islamic extremists and rival religious and ethnic groups regularly plague the country’s Shiite, Christian, Ahmadi, Hindu, and Sikh populations".