Latest news with #NadiaBaloch
Arab News
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Family of detained Baloch rights activist moves Supreme Court against her arrest
ISLAMABAD: The family of a detained Pakistani Baloch rights activists, Dr. Mahrang Baloch, filed a petition in Pakistan's Supreme Court on Wednesday, seeking to overturn a provincial court ruling that upheld her arrest under public order laws, according to a local media report. Baloch, a physician and a civil society activists, has been held at Quetta's Hudda District Jail since March 22 after she participated in protests following a separatist militant attack on a passenger train in Balochistan. She was arrested under the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) law, a move her supporters described as part of a broader crackdown on nonviolent dissent in the restive province. The petition, filed by her sister, argues that the detention is arbitrary and aimed at silencing peaceful activism. 'Nadia Baloch, the sister of Dr. Mahrang Baloch, urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday to set aside the April 15 order of the Balochistan High Court that rejected the plea against her detention under the Maintenance of Public Order,' the English-language newspaper Dawn quoted from the petition. The detained activist, who leads the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, also published a letter from prison in the US-based Time magazine this week, in which she asserted that 'speaking up for justice is not a crime.' Pakistani authorities have accused Baloch of promoting the narrative of separatist groups like the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) in public. However, her letter in the American magazine maintained the officials had not provided any evidence of her links with BLA or any other militant group while criticizing the authorities for blurring the line between militancy and peaceful protest. Earlier this year, the Balochistan High Court dismissed Baloch's initial challenge to her detention, advising her to seek administrative remedies instead of judicial relief. Her sister's petition has now asked the apex court to suspend that ruling and review whether constitutional protections such as habeas corpus were ignored in the previous judicial decision. The Supreme Court has yet to announce when it will take up the case for hearing.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Pakistan Jails Baloch Human Rights Activist
Activists from Baloch Yakjehti Committee and civil society hold portraits of Mahrang Baloch, one of Pakistan's most prominent human rights advocates, during a protest demanding her release, in Karachi on Mar. 24, 2025. Credit - Asif Hassan—AFP/Getty Images Pakistan has again arrested Mahrang Baloch, a prominent champion of human rights for the country's ethnic Baloch minority, and barred her lawyer from visiting her in jail. 'She was looking weak and stressed,' her sister Nadia Baloch told TIME on Monday after being allowed a few minutes with the activist in Quetta's Hudda District Prison, where she has been held since Saturday. Mahrang Baloch's lawyer was not allowed in; nor was the food her family had brought. 'Our greatest fear is that she will be given contaminated food—or worse, something harmful,' Nadia Baloch said. The circumstances of Mahrang Baloch's arrest illustrate both the complexities and the risks of her work for the Balochis. The ethnic group, whose population is often put at between 10 and 15 million, resides on arid lands divided by the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Like the Kurds, whose historic homeland was arrayed among several Middle Eastern states when nation states were being drawn, many Balochis want more autonomy, if not a state of their own—and some have taken up arms. Pakistan's Balochistan province has seen decades of conflict between the separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and a heavily militarized state. The latest clash, on March 11, appeared to mark a dramatic new level in its guerrilla and terror operations when a BLA force hijacked a train, resulting in scores of deaths. Pakistan's response to the insurgency has been a decades-long 'dirty war' that has left thousands of Balochi citizens missing and presumed dead. Mahrang Baloch founded the Baloch Yekjehti [Solidarity] Committee to advocate for a political future grounded in recognition of human rights, including ascertaining the fates of the disappeared. The state has not engaged, however. After the hijacking of the Jaffar Express, state security forces ramped up pressure on Balochi human rights advocates, detaining several Solidarity activists in Quetta, the Balochistan provincial capital. On Friday, state forces opened fire on protesters who had assembled to demand their release, killing three. Mahrang Baloch was arrested the next day at a sit-in where protesters had assembled with the bodies of the victims. 'She is quite strong. She will not give up on this,' said Imran Baloch, her attorney, who like many Balochis uses Baloch as a surname but is no relation. The lawyer said the state clearly feels threatened by Mahrang's increasing prominence, noting that it escalated against her in October after she was included in the TIME100 Next list of the world's emerging leaders. Mahrang learned that she had been placed on a no-fly list and her passport had been suspended only when she was turned away from her flight to New York to attend a TIME event. Her lawyer said she also felt 'pressurized' by the state after she was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. 'There is a complex web of violence and human-rights violations in Balochistan that creates a very challenging environment for human-rights defenders, particularly women human-rights defenders, working on issues of enforced disappearance,' Sarah de Roure, the global head of protection at the advocacy group Front Line Defenders, told TIME in October, after Mahrang was detained at the Karachi airport. 'She is being targeted as a woman, she is being targeted as a Baloch woman, because of the work that she's doing, which is publicly speaking on the issue of enforced disappearance—initially around her own family, and then as part of a broader movement.' Following her latest arrest, prominent human rights advocates, including Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Defenders, called for her release. Nadia Baloch, the sister, said family members were turned away the three previous days they went to the jail. 'So today we said that we will be on hunger strike if you will not allow us to meet her. Then they just allowed me to visit her for few minutes,' she said. 'She did not know the reason that she was arrested. I must say that is illegal, that they have not allowed her lawyer to meet her. They have isolated her in a room separate from the other prisoners.' Contact us at letters@
