UN Experts Say Pakistan Still Hasn't Responded to Their Warning on Forced Conversion of Minority Girls

Three UN special rapporteurs used a Human Rights Council side event on October 2, 2026 to tell Pakistan that its legal framework on forced religious conversion and child marriage of minority girls will keep failing victims as long as access to justice stays as patchy as it is — and a follow-up piece published October 5 says Islamabad has yet to formally respond.

Who spoke, and what they said

The side event featured Nicolas Levrat, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues; Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences; and Katarina Schwarz, the newly appointed Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery and trafficking in persons. Levrat's keynote argued that impunity around forced religious conversion "will not be solved by new laws or legislation" alone, pointing to families who go from court to court without remedy. Schwarz went further, arguing that child marriage can itself fall within the legal category of slavery, and urged Pakistan to provide "robust and effective protection" to meet its existing international obligations rather than waiting on new statutes.

The case that keeps coming up

The event repeatedly returned to the case of Maria Shahbaz, a Christian girl from Lahore who was abducted at 13 in mid-2025 and coerced into conversion and marriage to her abductor. Pakistan's Federal Constitutional Court returned her to the man's custody despite NADRA records confirming she was a minor at the time, a ruling that triggered sustained protest from Pakistan's Christian community and a European Parliament resolution demanding her protection. Pakistan's Supreme Court has been active on related family-law questions this year, but the Maria Shahbaz case sits in a different, constitutional-bench track that hasn't moved in the same direction.

What the data shows

The Jubilee Campaign's Stolen Girls report, cited at the side event, documented at least 210 cases of minor Christian girls across Pakistan who were abducted, forcibly converted and subjected to child marriage between 2019 and 2025. Of those, 83% of victims were under 18 — 134 were aged 14 to 17 and 41 were under 14 — with an average victim age of 12.8 years against an average perpetrator age of 35.8, an average gap of 23 years that exceeded 30 years in several documented cases. The report also found that 92% of the marriage contracts involved falsified ages specifically to get around existing child-marriage laws, which is the enforcement gap the rapporteurs were pointing at rather than a gap in the statute books themselves. Separate UN analysis from 2025 found that roughly 75% of forced-conversion-through-marriage victims were Hindu and 25% Christian, with nearly 80% of cases concentrated in Sindh province.

Where this overlaps with Pakistan's other child-marriage problem

This is a narrower, minority-specific slice of a broader enforcement gap this desk has covered before: Human Rights Focus Pakistan told the Human Rights Council's own 63rd session in September that 54% of all child marriages nationally happened in provinces where the marriage already violated the minimum-age law in force at the time. Rights groups argue minority marriages are undercounted even within that already-troubling national picture, because they are registered less consistently than marriages within Pakistan's Muslim majority — meaning the true scale of forced conversion specifically is likely higher than the Stolen Girls report's 210 documented cases.

Pakistan's response so far

As of the October 5 follow-up, Pakistan's government had not issued a formal, substantive reply to the rapporteurs' statement. That silence is itself becoming part of the story: rights groups monitoring the case say the pattern of acknowledging international pressure without committing to specific enforcement changes — more prosecutions, faster court timelines, consistent registration of minority marriages — is the same pattern HRFP flagged with child marriage legislation more broadly. Pakistan's GSP+ trade status with the EU already carries conditions tied to broader human-rights performance, and minority-rights advocates want enforcement on forced conversion specifically added to the list of measurable benchmarks attached to that kind of external leverage.

What to watch next

The rapporteurs' statement doesn't carry binding force on its own — UN special procedures experts can recommend and criticize, but Pakistan sets its own domestic enforcement priorities. The next concrete marker will be whether Islamabad responds formally to the Human Rights Council, and whether any of the pending minority-marriage cases working through Pakistan's court system move toward the "robust and effective protection" Schwarz called for, rather than another verdict like Maria Shahbaz's.

Build Better Pakistan's Rights Desk is tracking Pakistan's response to the UN rapporteurs' statement and will follow up if Islamabad formally replies.