Education, Human Rights Violations in Pakistan and the Scandal involving UNHCR and Christian asylum seekers in Thailand
Firstly, I would like to thank you all for attending this event. I would like to thank Jim Shannon MP, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pakistan Minorities for sponsoring this; Wilson Chowdhry for chairing this and the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities and the British Pakistani Christian Association for supporting this event. To the speakers and all those attending: Thank you very much.
This book was initially published in early September 2015 to highlight, as its title indicates, the nature of human rights violations in Pakistan; the scandal involving the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Pakistani Christian asylum seekers in Thailand and the context in which Pakistan’s educational policy has contributed to the human rights crisis.
The book was emailed to every UK MP and member of the House of Lords and led, amongst other things, to calls in parliament by MP David Burrowes and Lord Alton to the Home Office to alter its questionable asylum guidance with regard to Christian asylum seekers.
Dr. Nazir S Bhatti, President of the Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC) said that the first edition of this book “on persecution of Pakistani Christians prepared by the British Pakistani Christian Association (BPCA) was eye opening and could be evidence to revise guidance by the UK Administration. The PCC Central Secretariat in its press note stated that the President of the Pakistan Christian Congress ha[d] written a letter to the Prime Minister David Cameron for a revision of guidance by the UK Home Office about Pakistani Christians, to recognize them as a persecuted and oppressed community of Pakistan”.i
Lord Bates submitted an answer on October 5th 2015: [and I quote]: “The Home Office will be considering the report commissioned by the British Pakistani Christian Association alongside a range of other material to make a full assessment of the situation of Christians in Pakistan and will revise its country information and guidance if necessary“. On 12th October 2015, in response to the earlier parliamentary question that had been posed by MP David Burrowes, James Brokenshire replied [and I quote]:
The Home Office will be considering the report commissioned by the British Pakistani Christian Association alongside a range of other material to make a full assessment of the situation of Christians in Pakistan, and will revise its country information and guidance if necessary.ii
For full assessment, the All Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief launched a Parliamentary Inquiry for Call for Evidence, and this book was submitted to the inquiry alongside a presentation by myself and many others. The Parliamentary Inquiry findings called, amongst other things, for a revision of the flawed Home Office guidance which refused to acknowledge the persecution of Christians and which also had problematic positions concerning various aspects of persecution of ‘Others’ from Pakistan.
The Home Office subsequently published revised guidance which, whilst acknowledging some aspects of targeting, still presented dangerously flawed assessments.
This third edition includes new chapters that further examine these flawed assessments and the ‘deep’ publicly unaccountable politics that influenced these assessments, alongside others that further examine the politics of educational ‘instruction’; the controversies surrounding the use of English and Urdu as [a] medium of instruction, also when promoted by British aid programmes; the globalised marketing of the ‘Malala’ brand; the pre-and-post 9/11 politics of privatisation in education and the nature of ‘Development policy and Disaster Capitalism’ as applied to the educational/international aid and edu-business sectors in Pakistan.
The aim of the updated third edition of this book has been to stimulate debate and action from concerned members of the public, parliamentarians worldwide, the UK Independent Commission for Aid Impact (which is being presented with this book), several European rights organisations, the UK Commons Select Committee/International Development Committee (where this is being presented as a formal submission to its ongoing Inquiry examining the effectiveness or otherwise of the Department for International Development’s international educational aid programmes), public interest and community and non-government organisations, lawyers, academics, educationalists, investigative journalists, refugee and asylum and linguistic rights campaigners, faith and non-faith groups and students.
The book is also being presented to several organizations working to improve the rights of asylum seekers and refugees in Thailand (AsylumAccess, the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network, Fortify Rights, the Human Rights Development Foundation, the Jesuit Refugee Service, the Migrant Working Group and the People’s Empowerment Foundation) as well as Thai and Pakistan Embassy officials and Malaysia’s and Bangkok-Thailand’s UNHCR’s Senior Protection Officers. It is also being sent to every Australian MP and senator and presented to a number of asylum rights, faith and non-faith based organisations in Australia that are campaigning to revise Australia’s highly questionable asylum policies and practices.
Senator Abetz in Australia, indeed, in the past three weeks has used this new edition to create a question in the debate house and the book has triggered confirmation of a new quota of 100 people who will be granted asylum where otherwise it had previously not been considered. Whilst this is a small, small contribution, to the 100 people it will mean much more and hopefully it will stimulate a deeper discussion of protection that needs to be provided to many, many more persecuted people applying for asylum in Australia.
A copy of this edition is being presented to the UK Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office as well as the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and it is hoped that concerned parliamentarians from European countries, MEP’s and concerned public interest groups and members of the public will use the books numerous findings to additionally confront relevant governmental, supra-governmental and EU bodies with their highly questionable asylum policies and the patently flawed “guidance” reports that are deliberately being used to cynically shut doors on people fleeing the worst kinds of horrors.
The updated third edition of this book is being released because of the urgency of the situation, just a few months after the bomb explosion in Lahore on Easter Sunday 2016 which killed 72 people and injured hundreds; a few months after the UK Home Office submitted yet another dangerously flawed and highly questionable ‘guidance’ report about Christians from Pakistan and a few months after the Foreign and Commonwealth Office controversially backtracked on its earlier position that Christians from Pakistan had, in recent years, alongside ‘Othered communities’ in the country, clearly been reportedly subjected to “targeted persecution”.
The current Home Office position scandalously remains that [and I quote] “Christians in Pakistan are a religious minority who, in general, suffer discrimination but this is not sufficient to amount to a real risk of persecution … A person who fears persecution in Pakistan purely on the basis of their Christian faith is unlikely to qualify for a grant of asylum or humanitarian protection” although full account must be taken of the individual circumstances of each case.
The
book extensively details how flawed such an assessment is.
ISIS is making genocidal inroads into Pakistan, as this book also documents, just it has done in Syria and Iraq and we need – on World Kobane Day –
today, to reiterate the need to struggle against these genocidal forces and to provide protection, shelter and more to those “Othered
people and communities” fleeing such terror. Yet, the UK, EU and many other governments continue, as this book documents, to try to keep as many “Othered”
people out.
The Baloch and ‘Othered’ communities such as Ahmadi Muslim, Hindu and Hazara communities, as this book details at length, are being subjected to persecution,
even genocide. Yet, the British and other governments and the EU are not taking appropriate actions to halt inappropriate arms sales and support for
those very state and non-state forces that are creating such destabilisation, forced displacements and genocidal terror. This applies as much to what
is happening in Pakistan as in Libya and Syria. The consequences of all these actions on women and children and widows are terrifying in the extreme.
We are aware of the genocide of the Yazidi by ISIS and other forces, yet still see the British government doing what it can to restrict asylum as much
as possible to those most needing it. As noted by Amal Clooney less than 2 months ago, just one Yazidi family, despite the ISIS genocide in Iraq and Syria, has been allowed so far into the UK. Pakistani Christians and Othered people targeted from Pakistan and Balochistan appear to be similarly, as this
book documents, subjected to discriminatory targeting that seeks to deny asylum to those who are persecuted.
Rejection rates for Pakistan asylum seekers remain extremely high. Statistics released by the British Home Office revealed that from June 2015-2016
2,992 Pakistanis filed applications for asylum in the UK. Only 16 of them were granted asylum,
As things stood by April 2016, the rejection rate for ‘Pakistani migrants/Pakistani asylum seekers’ from Europe was shocking: “The rejection rate …
stands at over 90 percent”, notes one assessment.cxxiv
Nikolia Apostolou confirmed on 15th August 2016 that “in late February, authorities started arresting Pakistanis and North Africans to deport them … No government wants the Pakistanis…
Pakistanis have little chance of being allowed to stay. According to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, only 10 percent of the 48,000 Pakistanis that applied for asylum throughout Europe in 2015 were approved. The rest will be deported.
In Greece, the rate is even lower: About 2 percent of the asylum applications were accepted. And the situation at the camps is worsening …
“My client asked me at the beginning of April to visit him at the camp of Moria, where he was detained”, says Manolis Chatzichalkias, a lawyer in Lesbos. “I visited and saw that in a special part of Moria, 148 Pakistanis were held separately. None of them were told they could apply for asylum”.
But even after Chatzichalkias informed them of their rights to apply for asylum, the police continued to block them from applying.
The book details the mechanics of these flawed, many would call institutionally racist, asylum systems and the biased and highly questionable stances and positions taken by leading politicians that have endangered the lives of so many people fleeing from intolerable conditions: For example, we have European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans speaking about “his expectations for an agreement with Turkey aimed at helping to stem the flows of migrants into the European Union from Syria and elsewhere”, making it clear that he, in a highly discriminatory fashion, essentially considers people from Pakistan and Afghanistan as undeserving ‘migrants’ as opposed to asylum seekers (and I quote from him: “people who come here who don’t have theright to international protection and therefore should be returned” – close quote).
This book details the way in which ‘forced returns’ of asylum seekers to countries like Pakistan are used as ‘bargaining chips’ in economic and imperialistic ‘games’ by publicly unaccountable circles. It cites assessments that suggest that Pakistan’s access to British aid and investment is partly conditional on accepting deportations from the UK as well as co-operation on particular counter-terrorism initiatives.
The very nature of the UK’s international developmental educational aid is highly destructive on a number of levels regarding linguistic human rights violations, as this book documents, and appropriate parliamentary inquiry groups and bodies and public interest groups need to confront these realities and ask why they are allowed to continue as they do. Indeed, a case can be strongly made, as this book details, that British international educational aid initiatives have been promoting linguistic genocide alongside other types of human rights injustices.
It is hoped that the findings of – and concerns raised by – this book will be carefully scrutinised, debated and confronted not only by the the UK Commons Select Committee/International Development Committee, the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on International Freedom of Religion or Belief and the All Parties Parliamentary Group on Pakistan but also the newly formed UK All Parliamentary Party Group for Pakistani Minorities, whose current aims are:
- To improve the lives of the stranded Pakistani refugees in Thailand by negotiating with the Thai Government officials.
- To bring to the attention of the UN, the human rights violations of the refugees from the Pakistani minorities background in Thailand.
- To contact the Provincial Government of Punjab and Sindh provinces, to draw attention to the increasing numbers of Christian/Hindu girls who are abducted, raped and forced to marry their kidnappers.
- To improve the chances of obtaining asylum in the UK by asylum seekers from a Pakistani minorities background (here, we should also note too that the Baloch have been made a ‘minority’ through forced military occupation and colonisation when they were not a ‘minority’ in Balochistan).
- To use UK aid as a leverage to improve the ratio of Christian/Hindu girls in full time education.
- To use the UK aid as an instrument to reduce hate material in school text books.
- To keep MP’s up to date with the latest developments in Pakistan.
- To bring to the attention of the UK Parliament and the Government, any atrocities committed against the minorities in Pakistan.
It is also hoped that due attention will be paid to the destructive impacts of the blasphemy laws on various sections of society in Pakistan and the ineffectiveness and unwillingness of government organs to address these concerns. Asia Bibi terrifyingly still faces the death penalty as we gather here.
The book also documents, in the case of the Baloch genocide and the disappearances of tens of thousands of people, the responsibility of state organs and proxies in perpetrating the genocide and state terrorism. International governmental support for such genocidal crimes needs to be exposed, halted and held to account. This book seeks to examine why and how human rights violations are being perpetrated, and it also suggests avenues that could be taken to address these concerns.
Thank you.