Three cases from Pakistan this month underline the same pattern: human rights defenders who report on state repression, or who campaign for the truth about it, continue to pay a heavy personal price.
On 22 June 2026, the Anti-Terrorism Court in Balochistan sentenced human rights defenders Dr. Mahrang Baloch and Sibghatullah Abdul Haq (Shahji) to life imprisonment, convicting them of terrorism, sedition, and murder. The case concerns the killing of a security officer in 2024; both defenders are accused of inciting a mob through « provocative speech » at a protest in July 2024, a charge they have consistently denied. The trial, held in Hudda Jail, raises serious concerns over due process and the criminalisation of human rights work.
Dr. Mahrang Baloch is a leading figure in the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) and a vocal campaigner against violations by Pakistan’s police, military, and intelligence agencies. She led the Baloch Long March against extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances in November 2023, and took part in the July 2024 Baloch National Gathering in Gwadar, which was violently suppressed by security forces. Sibghatullah Shahji, also an active BYC member, campaigned peacefully against enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, including through the 2023 Long March and the 2024 National Gathering.
Schedule 4 of the ATA is a watch-list mechanism with no judicial oversight, under which listed individuals are denied basic rights. Both defenders have been detained since March 2025 — Mahrang Baloch arrested on 23 March, Shahji on 30 March — part of a wider campaign of arrests, raids, and reprisals against the BYC, in which several members remain in detention and others have faced collective punishment, including enforced disappearance or threats against family members. Front Line Defenders strongly condemns the persecution of Baloch human rights defenders, particularly Mahrang Baloch and Sibghatullah Shahji, as reprisal for their legitimate human rights work.
On 20 June 2026, Pakistani police detained Ahmad Farhad — a Kashmiri human rights defender, journalist, and poet — in Bagh City, in Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu and Kashmir. He was on his way home after covering an ongoing protest organised by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) in Rawalakot. He is currently held at Bagh City Police Station, with no formal arrest warrant or legal grounds disclosed.
Farhad reports on social justice issues, human rights violations, and the suppression of peaceful movements, most recently through his outlet, the Times of Kashmir, covering the JAAC protest movement — a movement that has itself faced disproportionate force, with thousands of protesters reportedly arrested under a public order ordinance that allows preventive detention with little judicial oversight.
He was detained in the early hours of 21 June while driving back from the protest. A week earlier, he had been named in a police report under a provision commonly used to ban public gatherings — though he was subsequently granted bail by a court. Since his detention, police have not shared any arrest order, report, or legal basis for holding him.
This is not Farhad’s first experience of state reprisal: in 2024, he was abducted, in an incident that later turned into a formal arrest, alongside criminalisation and public stigmatisation. Front Line Defenders has raised serious concern for his safety in custody, particularly given this history, and situates his case within a broader pattern of repression in the region — one compounded by internet blackouts and movement restrictions that make independent reporting on such violations even harder.
On 28 June 2026, seventeen years passed since Dr. Deen Mohammed Baloch, a physician from Balochistan, was forcibly disappeared in Khuzdar district. His whereabouts remain unknown to this day, and Pakistani authorities have never given his family a credible account of what happened to him.
His daughter, Sammi Deen Baloch, was ten years old when he disappeared. What began as one family’s search for answers grew into one of Pakistan’s most prominent movements against enforced disappearance. As General Secretary of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP), she now supports other families across Balochistan searching for missing relatives — organising marches and protests, documenting disappearance cases, and helping families navigate the process of registering them with authorities. In 2024, Front Line Defenders recognised her work with its Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk
That work has come at a cost. Sammi has faced repeated raids on her home, surveillance, online defamation campaigns, and arbitrary arrest — including her own forced disappearance for seven days in 2016, and a further arrest by Karachi police in March 2025. As is common in Balochistan, where families of the disappeared — often mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters — are themselves targeted for speaking out, her activism has made her a target in her father’s place.
Enforced disappearance is considered a continuing crime under international law for as long as a victim’s fate remains unknown — meaning the harm inflicted on families like the Balochs does not end with the disappearance itself, but continues with every year that passes without answers. Sammi Deen Baloch and the wider movement of families in Balochistan continue to call on Pakistani authorities to disclose the fate of Dr. Deen Mohammed Baloch and all those disappeared, to conduct prompt and impartial investigations into every case, and to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
Ahmad Farhad’s detention without warrant and Sammi Deen Baloch’s seventeen-year wait for the truth are separated by geography, but not by cause. Both reflect a system in which reporting on abuses, or simply demanding accountability for them, is treated as a threat to be silenced rather than a right to be protected. Front Line Defenders continues to call on Pakistani authorities to release Ahmad Farhad, disclose his legal basis for detention if one exists, and to finally answer the question Sammi Deen Baloch has been asking for seventeen years: where is her father?
