Pakistan on Both Sides of the Microphone: Item 9 General Debate at HRC 63

CAP Liberté de Conscience — Session coverage, 63rd session of the Human Rights Council

Pakistan appeared twice at the Item 9 general debate on 1 October 2026, in two different capacities. Once as the voice of others: its ambassador delivered the statement of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to the Human Rights Council, denouncing the desecration of the Quran and attacks on mosques. Once as a target: in the NGO segment that followed, no fewer than eight organizations directed their statements at Islamabad, cataloguing enforced disappearances in Balochistan, life sentences handed down by military courts, the expulsion of 2.3 million Afghans, forced conversions of Hindu girls, and a father of three held incommunicado since a secret trial. A member state that came to accuse spent the afternoon being accused.

The session

Agenda Item 9 covers racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The debate, spread over the Council’s 34th and 35th meetings, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action and was anchored by the report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on education as a tool to prevent racism, submitted pursuant to Council resolution 57/24. Dimitar Chalavan, Chief of the Equality and Non-Discrimination Branch at OHCHR, presented the report, which draws on 135 submissions from states and stakeholders and advances roughly twenty measures, from curriculum audits to teacher training, on the premise that education systems can dismantle racism or reproduce it. As the session progressed, the Durban framework served less as a shared roadmap than as contested ground, with Western states, African states, Islamic states and human rights organizations each invoking it against different adversaries.

The accuser

Pakistan’s first intervention spoke for the OIC, and it set the tone of grievance the group has made its signature at this agenda item. Twenty-five years after Durban, its promises remained unfulfilled; exclusivist political forces were weaponizing religious intolerance through repeated public desecration of the Holy Quran and armed attacks on mosques; selective approaches protected some communities while remaining silent on others; freedom of expression did not license hate speech, and Articles 19 and 20 of the ICCPR were clear. The statement closed by invoking Council resolutions 16/18 and 53/1 and calling for their full, non-selective implementation.

The second Pakistani intervention dropped the collective voice. Contemporary racism, the delegate said, had been mainstreamed into politics, and across Pakistan’s border ruling elites demonized Muslims, targeted centuries-old mosques and shrines, and subverted Muslim political participation in the name of Hindutva. In Indian-illegally-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, some 900,000 troops were engineering demographic change through fake domiciles and the denial of self-determination. The promises of Durban, the delegate concluded, must be kept to peoples under foreign occupation.

The contempt of the reply

India did not engage the substance. Its representative confined the response to a single sentence: as regards the provocation by a state that sponsors terrorism and is a serial violator of human rights, India’s replies earlier in the session were on record, and it treated the remarks with the contempt they deserved. The exchange followed a well-worn choreography of the Council, in which Item 9 becomes a stage for reciprocal indictment between two nuclear-armed neighbors, each certain that racism is the other’s domestic product.

What the choreography could not absorb was what came next.

A daughter’s plea

The NGO segment opened a different file on Pakistan, and its most arresting moment arrived mid-list. Talia Khan Khattak, daughter of the Pashtun human rights defender Idris Khattak, took the floor under the name of Fundación Vida and Grupo Ecológico Verde. Her statement, barely two minutes, grounded itself in the Durban Declaration’s commitment to equality and equal treatment before tribunals. Her father was abducted from his car on 13 November 2019 and disappeared for seven months; in November 2021 a military court sentenced him to fourteen years after a secret trial on espionage charges. On 10 November 2025, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted Opinion No. 62/2025, finding his detention arbitrary and contrary to international law and calling for his immediate release, compensation and an investigation. He is 63, permitted no telephone calls, denied adequate medical care; in April 2026 UN experts warned that his uncontrolled diabetes had become life-threatening. The statement ended with a single request: that the Council urge Pakistan to release him. A daughter, in the world’s foremost human rights forum, asking for her father. CAP Liberté de Conscience has published the full statement; the Council’s record now carries it too.

Balochistan, in triplicate

Around that plea, a pattern formed. Three separate organizations built, without coordinating, the same dossier from different angles.

Global Human Rights Defense described a widening crackdown on Baloch human rights defenders, students and families of the disappeared, citing the case of Marang Baloch, sentenced on 22 June 2026 to life imprisonment after what it called an expedited secret prison trial without direct evidence, and families pressured to sign declarations disowning relatives accused of militancy, on pain of property confiscation. The International Humanitarian Society for Development Without Borders, for its part, evoked a 225-kilogram bomb dropped by the military on infants in Balochistan the previous month, asking the room to consider what that number means only to those who carried the coffins, and recalled that Dr. Mahrang Baloch remains imprisoned for documenting enforced disappearances. Moku completed the triptych with procedural detail: the head of the Baloch Yakjahti Committee was detained in October 2024 while attempting to travel to a Time 100 event, her passport seized, and Pakistan retains no domestic law defining torture in line with the Convention against Torture.

The northwestern frontier

Two further statements addressed the constitutional limbo of Pakistan-administered territories. The Center for Human Rights and Peace Advocacy reported that peaceful assemblies protesting economic marginalization in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan met arbitrary detentions, internet blockades and excessive force, with reportedly more than one hundred protesters killed, and demanded access for independent UN fact-finding missions. Al Barim Association raised the extension of military jurisdiction over civilians, including protesters mobilized by the Jammu-Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee over electricity, subsidies and governance, urging that civilians be tried before independent civilian courts.

Expulsion and conversion

Two other interventions widened the frame. Action for Development addressed the illegal foreigners repatriation plan, which it said has expelled over 2.3 million Afghan nationals in breach of the principle of non-refoulement, separating families and exposing returnees to persecution, with women and girls most vulnerable. Redistan Samra Kalyan Sanstana spoke for Pakistan’s Hindus, citing UN experts’ findings that about 75 per cent of women and girls affected by forced conversion through marriage in 2025 were Hindu, nearly 80 per cent of cases occurring in Sindh, including that of a 13-year-old girl whose documents presented her as an adult. Religious freedom, the speaker said, is not a favor.

The empty chair

The session’s procedural footnote completes the picture. When the general debate closed, the right of reply was exercised by Indonesia, rebutting criticism of its Papua policy, and by Sudan, attacking an NGO that had documented ethnic targeting in Darfur as a cover for militia propaganda. Pakistan, though named in at least eight NGO statements and in the sharpest bilateral exchange of the day, did not take the floor to answer any of it. Its silence was not an oversight. At Item 9, the accuser had become the accused, and the Durban Declaration’s promise of equal treatment before tribunals was invoked most precisely by the daughter of a man whose tribunal met in secret.