The EU Reinforces Trade Preferences: Human Rights and the GSP+ Revision

CAP Liberté de Conscience has long maintained that trade preferences must carry human rights obligations that are more than declaratory. This position has been shaped by sustained field-level engagement — conducted principally in partnership with the International Human Rights Committee (IHRC) — on the situation of religious minorities in Pakistan, a country that has held GSP+ status since 2014.

In September 2024, CAP LC and IHRC submitted a comprehensive report to the 142nd Session of the UN Human Rights Committee (CCPR), documenting the alarming escalation of violence and systemic persecution faced by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Pakistan. The report recorded four targeted murders in the first seven months of 2024 alone, 44 attacks on Ahmadi mosques in 2023, the desecration of 109 Ahmadi graves, and the denial of voting rights to Ahmadis — enforced since 1985 through a discriminatory, separate non-Muslim electoral register. The submission also highlighted the case of Mubarak Ahmad Sani, sentenced to life imprisonment for memorising the Quran and distributing religious texts — a case that laid bare both the complicity of the judiciary and its vulnerability to extremist pressure. [^1]

In March 2026, CAP LC and IHRC jointly submitted a critical report to the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) for its 84th session, examining Pakistan’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture. The submission documented the custodial death of Dr Tahir Mahmood, a 71-year-old Ahmadi arrested for offering Friday prayers, who died following severe beatings in police detention and the deliberate denial of medical care. It recorded the lynching of Mr Laiq Ahmad Cheema by a mob of approximately 800 individuals in April 2025, and a sustained pattern of targeted assassinations of Ahmadi civilians between March 2024 and May 2025. The report argued that Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi legal framework — specifically the Second Amendment to the Constitution (1974) and Ordinance XX (1984) — institutionalises discrimination and creates the conditions in which torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment are perpetrated with effective impunity. [^2]

Following the CAT review, CAP LC and IHRC issued a joint response welcoming the Committee’s findings and stressing that torture must not be understood solely in terms of physical violence. For many Ahmadis, persecution manifests through sustained psychological suffering, intimidation, humiliation, threats of mob violence, arbitrary criminalisation, and the constant fear engendered by discriminatory laws. The organisations called on the Government of Pakistan to implement the CAT recommendations in full and urged the international community to monitor compliance closely. [^3]

These submissions are not isolated interventions. They form part of a cumulative record, built over years, that documents the widening gap between Pakistan’s ratification of international conventions and their effective implementation. The GSP+ mechanism has provided a framework for raising these concerns within the EU’s trade policy, but that framework has not always produced decisive action. The revised regulation offers a genuine opportunity to narrow that gap.

CAP LC and IHRC welcome the Council’s decision of 22 May 2026 and the reinforcement of GSP+ conditionality as a step towards making trade preferences a more credible instrument for human rights protection. The expansion of the convention list from 27 to 32, the broadening of negative conditionality to encompass environmental and governance standards, and the strengthened monitoring mechanisms together contribute to a more robust and coherent framework.

Both organisations note with particular interest the requirement that current GSP+ beneficiaries — including Pakistan — must submit a new application within two years, demonstrating compliance with the new requirements and presenting an action plan for effective implementation. This reappraisal offers a concrete opportunity to translate long-standing concerns into measurable benchmarks. Pakistan’s record on religious freedom, custodial abuse, and the persecution of the Ahmadiyya community — extensively documented by CAP LC and IHRC — should be central to the Commission’s evaluation of its reapplication.

The revised regulation’s treatment of sustainability as an integrated fabric — encompassing human rights, environmental protection, and governance — reflects precisely this understanding.

However, CAP LC and IHRC note with concern the inclusion of readmission conditionality. Both organisations have consistently held that asylum and refugee protection must not be subordinated to trade or migration management objectives. Linking trade preferences to readmission cooperation risks undermining the very human rights conventions the GSP is designed to promote — particularly when those seeking protection in the EU are fleeing persecution in GSP beneficiary countries. The EU must ensure that the readmission clause is not used to pressure states into accepting the return of individuals who hold a legitimate claim to international protection.

From Words to Action

The revised GSP regulation is a text of potential. It expands the list of conventions, broadens the scope of conditionality, and introduces new monitoring tools. But its effectiveness will depend on the Commission’s willingness to deploy the withdrawal procedure when violations are documented, and on the Parliament’s and Council’s willingness to hold the Commission accountable for inaction.

The history of the GSP offers both caution and precedent. The withdrawal of preferences from Cambodia in 2020, following serious and systematic violations of political rights under the ICCPR, demonstrated that the mechanism can and must be activated when the evidence demands it. Yet the revised regulation represents a conspicuous missed opportunity in one critical respect: GSP+ conditionality has never been explicitly linked to voting rights, notwithstanding that the ICCPR — in Article 25 — guarantees every citizen the right to participate in genuine elections without unreasonable restriction or discrimination. The denial of voting rights to Ahmadis in Pakistan, maintained through a discriminatory electoral register since 1985 and documented before the UN Human Rights Committee, constitutes precisely such a violation. Anchoring GSP+ conditionality directly to the right to vote would have provided one of the clearest, most verifiable mechanisms for ensuring that Pakistan honours its obligations under international law. That the revised regulation does not do so is a gap that the Commission, Parliament, and Council should urgently address — whether through implementing guidelines, monitoring frameworks, or the conditions attached to Pakistan’s reapplication. To leave it unaddressed is to allow a documented and systematic denial of political rights to fall outside the trade conditionality that is otherwise being strengthened.

The reappraisal of Pakistan’s GSP+ status, now required under the revised regulation, offers a further test. CAP LC and IHRC have provided the documentation. The Commission has the mandate. The question is whether the review of Pakistan’s reapplication will be an occasion for transforming words into acts — for deploying the lever that the EU has chosen to reinforce.

The regulation applies from 1 January 2027. Between now and then, the Commission must prepare implementing guidelines, current GSP+ beneficiaries must submit reapplications, and the new monitoring cycle must be established. The EU has set the rules. The test will be whether it plays the game.