Rooted in a history of racial profiling and state-sanctioned violence, the Pashtun ethnic community in Pakistan is subjected to a brutal and systematic campaign of human rights abuses. Pakistan’s ongoing repression against this community includes widespread enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Thousands of Pashtuns have vanished without a trace after being abducted by security forces, while many others have become victims of extrajudicial killings. Recently, the security forces have begun targeting civilians using drones in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region.
In response to these grave human rights violations, a demonstration in Geneva was held on September 18 at Broken Chair Square in front of the United Nations; Afghanischer Kulturverein Larawbar EV Germany, and the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement organized the event. Its purpose was to commemorate those who have suffered and endured trauma from systematic human rights violations. The protest also aimed to advocate against the targeted killings of civilians through drone attacks. The protest brought together human rights activists, community leaders, and members of the Pashtun diaspora. Attendees hoped that it would raise international awareness regarding the ongoing repression and human rights violations affecting Pakistan’s Pashtun community.
Across Pakistan’s Pashtun belt (the merged tribal districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and its adjoining areas), violence and emergency-style policing have hardened into a pattern of control that views entire communities as suspect. Rights groups, UN mechanisms, and international media have documented practices of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, excessive force during security operations, as well as the criminalization of peaceful activism.
Amnesty International’s South Asia portal, drawing on official commission tallies, has recorded at least 10,078 cases registered with Pakistan’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances since 2011. This includes 3,485 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 2,752 from Balochistan, the two provinces with large Pashtun populations. Amnesty notes that many cases go unreported and that temporary abductions followed by release or fabricated prosecutions are also used to silence critics. In April–May 2025, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances took the unusual step of issuing a general allegation to Pakistan at its 136th session, underscoring rising concerns about impunity.
Meanwhile, crackdowns on Pashtun civic mobilization have further intensified. In October 2024, authorities banned the Pashtun Tahaffuz (Protection) Movement (PTM) under anti-terrorism laws, casting a largely peaceful civil-rights platform as a security threat. Amnesty International called this an affront to freedom of association and urged its revocation. Days later, the Associated Press reported that three demonstrators were killed in clashes after the ban. These steps illustrate a broader tactic of using counterterrorism law to stigmatize nonviolent platforms and to justify arrests, surveillance, and movement restrictions.
Security operations in Pashtun areas have continued to expand under the banner of reinvigorated counterinsurgency. Pakistan launched “Azm-e-Istehkam” in June 2024 amid a rise in militant attacks. Independent reporting questioned whether fresh sweeps would repeat earlier patterns that punished communities without solving the insurgency. By mid-2025, UNICEF’s humanitarian updates described intelligence-based operations in Kurram district (KP), short-term displacement of residents, and returns marked by lingering distrust.
Landmines and other explosive remnants of war remain a lethal daily risk in Pashtun districts affected by decades of conflict. In July 2025, a landmine killed four people in Kurram, highlighting persistent contamination in precisely the areas where civilians farm, travel, and graze animals. Global monitoring confirms that civilians, especially children, constitute the overwhelming share of mine/ERW victims each year. For families in northern KP, these incidents are not outliers but rather the visible tip of a broader, under-recorded hazard.
Repression of media targets one natural space for free speech. In January 2025, Pakistan adopted new rules to tighten control over social media, creating tribunals that can impose prison terms of up to three years and fines of two million rupees for posting so-called “false” information. This prompted journalists’ unions and rights groups to warn of a chilling effect. Separately, access to X (formerly Twitter) was restricted for extended periods from February 2024 based on “national security” grounds. This affected newsgathering and community organizing in conflict-hit regions. Reporters Without Borders ranks Pakistan 158th of 180 countries in its 2025 index and flags the 2025 amendments to the cybercrime law as heightening censorship risks. These measures narrow oversight of security operations and make it harder for Pashtun activists, lawyers, and families of the disappeared to be heard.
Digital repression is also happening to Pashtuns. A new Amnesty-cited investigation describes large-scale phone-tapping and a national web-filtering firewall capable of blocking hundreds of thousands of links at once, with the brunt of these efforts occurring in insurgency-hit provinces. Such systems, rights groups warn, are used alongside harassment and abductions to deter dissent and to mute documentation of abuses in Pashtun and Baloch communities. The effect is to shift surveillance from targeted to ambient, in other words, the creation of an architecture of control that normalizes rights violations.
The legacy of drone warfare also shapes Pashtun grievances. For over a decade (2004–2018), most US drone strikes in Pakistan occurred in the Pashtun belt, leaving a documented civilian toll and legal vacuum for redress. Independent trackers and investigations, including those curated by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and New America, recorded civilian deaths in the hundreds and urged accountability for victims. Even though the strike campaign subsided years ago, families continue to seek truth and reparation. It speaks to a longer arc of violence in which residents feel trapped between militants, external operations, and domestic crackdowns.
International oversight has grown more vocal in 2024–2025. UN experts have repeatedly warned about extrajudicial killings, torture, and indiscriminate force, and have urged Pakistan to end impunity for serious violations. The UN human rights system and international NGOs have also called on Pakistan to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and dismantle legal shields that enable secret detention. Viewed together, the data trace a coherent system of repression. Enforced disappearance numbers remain high and concentrated in Pashtun-populated provinces; emergency-style operations continue to uproot civilians; mines and unexploded ordnance kill and maim; and speech controls from prosecutions to platform blocking shrink the space for scrutiny. When a peaceful civil-rights platform like PTM is banned under anti-terrorism law, it signals that standard political grievances will be treated as security threats.
A rights-first course correction is still possible. Pakistan should end enforced disappearances and bring suspected perpetrators, regardless of rank, to trial in civilian courts; rescind the PTM ban and stop using anti-terror statutes against peaceful activists; investigate civilian harm from security operations and mines in KP and former FATA; reopen and safeguard digital platforms; and invite UN mandate-holders to visit affected districts. These are not external impositions but prerequisites for restoring trust in a region that has paid the highest price in Pakistan’s long wars.
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