Pakistan Readymade Garments Manufactures and Exporters Association (PRGMEA) appealed to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Commerce Minister Naveed Qamar on April 21 to get personally involved to ensure that EU’s Generalised System of Preference Plus (GSP+) facility continues to be granted to Pakistan while its next review takes place. The PRGMEA described the GSP+ facility to Pakistan by the EU as an “issue of national importance”.
The major worry for Pakistani exporters has emanated from EU’s proposal to add five new conventions related to social, labour, environmental and climate standards to be complied with for availing the GSP+ after the current framework expires in 2023. The tentative estimates claim that if Pakistan fails to comply with the new clauses of the GSP+ facility, the GSP+ facility would no more be available to it causing a loss of around USD 3 billion of exports.
Pakistan faced an increased compliance scrutiny even during EU’s last GSP+ framework granted for a ten year period, i.e., 2014-23. Notwithstanding its claims about full compliance of the GSP+ pre-requisites, the gaps and failures of Pakistan in this regard have been glaring, particularly with regard to labour conditions including bonded labour and human trafficking, misuse of blasphemy laws and violation of children’s and women’s rights. It is notable that even before new proposals for adding new conventions 2023 onwards were floated for availing GSP+ facility, the European Parliament had adopted a resolution on 29 April 2021 highlighting the issue of fundamental rights, which countries must uphold for getting GSP+ status. This resolution was aimed at signaling all the beneficiaries of GSP+ that failure to protect human rights and ensure justice may snap their GSP+ status.
There is also a widespread concern among the EU members about unfair competition from Pakistan to European textile industries due to GSP+ under which Pakistani textile exports, constituting about 78% of its total export to EU, hurts the local industries. The EU bears up with this unfair competition in the hope of promoting democratic values and human rights.
The European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAs) in its report titled “Addressing the EU’s GSP+ Dilemma – An assessment of Pakistan’s GSP+ status, highlighted that in Pakistan the plight of labour is “appalling” as arrangements like “debt slavery”, especially in rural areas and “denial of opportunities for education and employment” continues unabated apart from lack of social security and standard minimum wages. The report also pointed out that women and children are the most vulnerable sections who are not only exploited but subjected to human trafficking. The children and women in Pakistan, according to the report, are forced to work under inhuman and bonded labour conditions and face a “great risk of sexual violence”. The dehumanizing working conditions are observed more in the unskilled, labour intensive industries such as leather, carpet, aquaculture and food processing, construction and brick kiln industries.
The report also highlighted that law enforcement in Pakistan remains weak, even in the areas where they exist.
Pakistan is lackadaisical in implementation of existing labour laws while it is yet to ratify, the ILO’s 1970 Minimum Wage Fixing Convention. The misuse of blasphemy laws against minorities and even members of the Muslim community to settle personal grudge in Pakistan is rampant.
The journalists in Pakistan also face violence if they have views critical to ruling dispensation or advocate liberal, progressive and modern views. According to Freedom Network (FN), Pakistan-based media rights watchdog, at least 86 cases of attacks and violation against media and practitioners, including journalists took place in Pakistan over the course of one year, i.e. between May 2021 and April 2022. In the report of FN, Islamabad emerged as the riskiest and most dangerous place to practice journalism. Sindh was the second worst followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In all such violations against the media practitioners in the country are suspected to have been done by the complicity and tacit support from state and its agencies.
The violation of human rights and freedom in Pakistan is also observed in the context of forced marriage of minority girls. According to National Commission to Justice and peace and Pakistan Hindu Council, around 1000 Christian and Hindu minority women are converted to Islam each year and then forcibly married off to their abductors or rapists. The practice is being reported increasingly in the districts of Tharparkar, Umerkot and Mirpur Khas in Sindh.
Pakistan is increasingly concerned and desperate about the possibility of losing GSP+ from EU due to its glaring failures in abiding by the stipulated conventions. This could be well understood from Islamabad’s Brussels Mission’s activism in recent times for reviving the exchange of parliamentary visits and parliamentary contacts to widen its outreach among individual European policy makers. Pak embassies in Europe have begun massive lobbying in host countries for continuation of the scheme.
But increased scrutiny and proposed inclusion of additional conventions would be difficult for Pakistan to comply as the country’s institutions as usual remain as “state-within-the state”, and more so when political uncertainty is looming large. Pakistan performed poorly on the original set of 27 conventions set as pre-condition for availing the GSP+ in the last framework. Going by its track record, it is not difficult to visualize that Islamabad would not do any better post 2023 revision of GSP+ criteria. This is because Pakistani state has not learnt to value international conventions on human and labour rights and even now maintains a feudal and patriarchal society with double standards, with glaring gap between framing of laws and implementing them.