Preferential Access, Deferred Reform: Pakistan's Uneasy Bargain with the EU's GSP+

For over a decade, Pakistan has enjoyed one of the more generous trade arrangements the European Union offers any developing country. The GSP+ scheme, which grants zero-tariff access for roughly two-thirds of EU tariff lines, was never meant to be an unconditional gift.

It was designed as an incentive structure: preferential access in exchange for the ratification and, crucially, the effective implementation of twenty-seven international conventions covering human rights, labour standards, environmental protection, and good governance.

Illustration by The Geostrata

Pakistan has held this status since 2014, and its textile and garment sector, the backbone of the country's export economy, has come to depend on it. The question that recurs with each biennial review, and that deserves more sustained public attention than it typically receives, is whether Pakistan has actually earned the privilege it continues to enjoy.

The record suggests a persistent and troubling gap between formal commitment and practical delivery.

SHRINKING CIVIC SPACE

Consider freedom of expression and civic space. Pakistan is a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, one of the core GSP+ conventions. Yet successive years of reporting from press freedom organisations and EU monitoring missions have documented an environment in which journalists face intimidation, enforced disappearance, and legal harassment under broad and vaguely worded cybercrime and sedition provisions. Digital platforms have been subject to arbitrary restriction.

Civil society organisations, particularly those working on minority rights or accountability, frequently describe an operating environment defined by surveillance and bureaucratic obstruction rather than the open civic space that GSP+ conditionality presumes.

MINORITIES AND THE BLASPHEMY LAW REGIME

Religious freedom presents an even starker picture. Pakistan's blasphemy laws, among the most severe in the world in their potential penalties, continue to be used disproportionately against religious minorities and, not infrequently, as instruments of personal or communal vendetta rather than genuine adjudication of faith-based offences. Forced conversions and forced marriages affecting Hindu and Christian minority women, particularly in Sindh, remain a documented and largely unaddressed phenomenon.

Mob violence linked to blasphemy accusations has, on repeated occasions, resulted in extrajudicial killings that the state has been slow to prosecute. These are not isolated incidents but patterns that recur with sufficient regularity to constitute a structural feature of the country's treatment of religious minorities, in clear tension with the non-discrimination obligations Pakistan has formally accepted.

DISAPPEARANCES, DETENTION, AND DUE PROCESS

Enforced disappearances and due process failures form a third area of concern. Pakistan has not ratified the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and domestic mechanisms established to investigate disappearances, notably the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, have been widely criticised by victims' families and human rights organisations as slow, opaque, and largely ineffective at securing accountability.

The practice has been documented most extensively in Balochistan and among political dissidents, journalists, and activists elsewhere in the country. Military courts continue to exercise jurisdiction over civilians in certain circumstances, a practice at odds with fair trial standards under international law.

LABOUR STANDARDS BEHIND THE EXPORT LEDGER

Labour rights, the area most directly tied to the export sectors that benefit from GSP+, tell a similarly uneven story. Pakistan has ratified core ILO conventions, but implementation remains weak. Labour inspection systems are underfunded and, in several provinces, largely dormant. Bonded labour persists in agriculture and brick kilns despite legal prohibition. Trade union formation faces both legal and practical obstacles, particularly in the informal sector, which employs the majority of Pakistan's workforce.

Given that the textile and garment industry is precisely the sector that most benefits from EU preferential access, the persistence of these labour deficits raises a direct question about whether the trade benefits Pakistan receives are being converted into the labour protections they are meant to incentivise.

WOMEN, CHILDREN, AND UNFINISHED REFORM

Women's and children's rights round out a troubling composite picture. Child marriage remains widespread despite legislative reform efforts that vary significantly by province and are inconsistently enforced. Gender-based violence, including honour-related killings, continues at levels that outpace the capacity or willingness of the criminal justice system to respond. Child labour remains entrenched in informal and export-adjacent sectors, complicating claims that supply chains benefiting from EU access are genuinely free of exploitative practices.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE THE GSP+ BARGAIN?

None of this is to suggest that Pakistan has made no progress. Legislative reforms on child marriage in some provinces, the passage of anti-torture legislation, and periodic engagement with UN treaty bodies indicate at least a formal acknowledgement of these obligations. But GSP+ was designed around a standard of effective implementation, not a legislative gesture. The distance between the two remains substantial, and the European Union's own monitoring reports have said as much, even as the trade relationship has continued largely uninterrupted.

This is where policy scrutiny becomes necessary. A trade arrangement premised on human rights conditionality loses its coherence if the conditionality is never meaningfully enforced. For the European Parliament, for civil society organisations engaged in GSP+ monitoring, and for journalists and researchers documenting these patterns, the task ahead is not simply to catalogue violations but to press for a genuine accounting: either Pakistan closes the gap between ratification and implementation, or the preferential terms it enjoys should reflect the reality on the ground rather than the aspiration on paper.

Trade privilege without accountability does not serve reform. It merely postpones the reckoning that Pakistan's own citizens, particularly its most vulnerable minorities, workers, and dissidents, continue to wait for.

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TEAM GEOSTRATA

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