Govt committed to protect rights of minorities: Shireen Mazari

ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari Thursday said that the government was committed to protect the rights of minorities and it had already made some legislation on it.

“Pakistan is progressively living up to the commitments; it has made on human rights issues,” she said addressing the concluding session of the national and provincial capacity building training workshop on ‘Reporting to International Human Rights Mechanism’ organised by OHCHR and UNDP here.

She said Pakistan was a democratic society and by safeguarding the human rights of its citizens the government could strengthen democracy, which was its top priority, a press release said.

Read More: PM vows to protect rights of minorities, promote inter-faith harmony

Dr Mazari said Human Rights Committee in Geneva had started looking up at the abuse of Human Rights of Muslims residing in the European Union (EU); and I spoke many times to HCHRC and EU that “we are putting all our endeavours to resolve the human rights related issues, especially protecting our minorities but Muslims are also facing issues in the EU”. She showed her concern on growing abuse of rights of Muslim citizens, residing in the EU.

Besides, Coordinator of UNDP in Pakistan Neil Buhne Resident, Chairman National Commission for Human Rights Justice (R) Ali Nawaz Chohan, representatives of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and other human rights stakeholders from different provinces were also present on the occasion. Dr Mazari also distributed the certificates among the participants of the workshop on the occasion.

She said that the capacity building training workshop will not only develop HR reporting implementation plan for measuring HR recommendations but also will improve the understanding of national and provincial stakeholders about international human rights system and Pakistan’s reporting. She said the workshop would improve the rights based data connection mechanism in the country.

Dr Mazari further said that Pakistan was building up a database on HR related issues and “we can better coordinate our data collection on HR in terms of hard data rather than abstract.”

“After having the joint data base we can know better exactly how much abuse is going on, so we can better take steps to protect the rights of people after having well-coordinated data base.”

The rights minister appreciated the efforts of the UNDP for their initiative of training and hoped that it would continue to support the ministry in having and establishing the hardware data base about human rights issues. She hoped that the UNDP will also come forward to further protect human rights after this training.

She thanked the UNDP and other subsidiary organizations for organizing this workshop and assured her support to work collectively with the UN for the protection of human rights.