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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 18, 2025
Freedom House Petitions UN Working Group to Declare Rights Defender’s Detention in Pakistan Arbitrary and Unlawful
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Idris Khattak has been imprisoned for more than five years for his work defending Pakistan’s Pashtun ethnic minority from persecution.
WASHINGTON—Today, Freedom House filed a petition
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with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) on behalf of Idris Khattak
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, a well-known human rights defender in Pakistan. Khattak is serving a 14-year prison sentence for his peaceful human rights work, which included documenting repression of the Pashtun minority in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province and the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and enforced disappearances there. The petition asks the WGAD to declare his detention arbitrary and unlawful.
“Idris Khattak has dedicated his life to defending the rights of Pakistan’s most vulnerable populations,” said Brian Tronic, director of Free Them All: The Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners. “The government of Pakistan should be celebrating him as a hero, not locking him up on baseless national security charges. Unfortunately, his detention represents the danger that many human rights defenders in Pakistan, and minority rights defenders in particular, face on a daily basis. We call on the government to release him immediately and unconditionally.”
On November 13, 2019, Khattak was abducted while driving in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province by suspected military officers dressed in plain clothes. Government officials initially denied any knowledge of his whereabouts, and he was forcibly disappeared until June 2020, when Pakistani officials finally admitted he was in the custody of the country’s military intelligence service. He was held in pretrial detention for over two years without a court order, incommunicado for extended periods of time, and repeatedly subjected to torture and other mistreatment. He remains in custody.
Khattak was eventually accused of violating the Official Secrets Act—a notoriously vague law that UN experts have described
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its use as “yet another means of silencing dissent from human rights defenders.” The charges alleged that he shared information on troop movements with a British spy in 2009. Mr. Khattak, however, did no such thing. Moreover, the alleged British “spy” was a world-renowned Irish academic and peace-building expert who had served with both the United Nations and European Union, and is a respected expert
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on Afghanistan.
Despite being a civilian, Khattak was tried by a military court, and the trial proceedings were marred by egregious due process violations. He was given very limited access to counsel; he was denied key case documents and evidence; his “confession” was admitted into evidence even though it was made under extreme duress; the prosecution used “secret” evidence that was shown only to the court, and not to the defense; and he was not allowed to call key defense witnesses.
In November 2021, after this sham trial, he was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison. His conviction was widely condemned by human rights organizations throughout the world, as well as UN experts, who noted
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that his case “is emblematic of how the military justice system is being instrumentalized to repress critical voices and rights activists,” and that
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his “sentencing is an attack against the human rights community in Pakistan.”
In recent years, Pakistan has experienced a steady and significant decline in political rights and civil liberties. In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2017 report
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, Pakistan received a cumulative score of 43/100, but by 2021
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, this had declined to 37/100, and by 2025
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, to 32/100.
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