United Nations human rights experts have issued a fresh warning over what they described as a continued and widespread pattern of abduction, forced religious conversion and coerced marriage targeting women and girls from minority communities in Pakistan, saying the abuse persists because perpetrators are too often shielded by impunity. In a statement published on April 22, the experts said the violations are affecting minority women and girls across the country, with the burden falling most heavily on Hindu and Christian communities.
The UN statement was unusually direct. It said any change of religion must be genuinely free of coercion and that marriage must rest on full and free consent — something the experts stressed is legally impossible when the victim is a child. They said the pattern is not random or isolated but part of a deeper structure of discrimination, where non-Muslim girls are pressured or compelled to convert to Islam in order to marry Muslim men.
The figures in the statement sharpened that warning. According to the experts, about 75 percent of women and girls affected in 2025 were Hindu and 25 percent were Christian, while nearly 80 percent of reported incidents occurred in Sindh province. The UN experts added that girls between 14 and 18 are especially vulnerable, though some victims are even younger, and said poverty and social exclusion make the risks worse.
The experts also laid part of the blame on Pakistan’s institutions. They said law-enforcement authorities often dismiss complaints filed by families, fail to investigate cases promptly, or do not properly determine the age of victims. That matters because age is often central to whether a marriage is treated as valid or as a crime. In plain terms, the UN is saying the problem is not only the abduction or coercion itself, but the way the system can end up normalising it.
This is not the first time the UN has sounded the alarm. In April 2024, UN experts said Christian and Hindu girls in Pakistan remained particularly vulnerable to forced religious conversion, abduction, trafficking, child and forced marriage, domestic servitude and sexual violence. That earlier statement also said courts had at times validated coerced conversions and marriages, sometimes invoking religious law and allowing girls to remain with alleged abductors instead of returning to their families.
The 2024 statement pointed to concrete examples, including the case of Mishal Rasheed, whom the UN said was abducted at gunpoint in 2022, sexually assaulted, forcibly converted and made to marry her abductor. It also cited a March 2024 case involving a 13-year-old Christian girl who was allegedly abducted, converted and married after her age was recorded as 18 on a marriage certificate. Those details gave the broader warning a grim, human face.
This week’s warning goes beyond condemnation and presses for specific legal changes. The experts called on Pakistan to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 in all provinces and territories, criminalise forced religious conversion as a distinct offence, and more firmly enforce laws dealing with human trafficking and sexual violence. They also urged authorities to investigate all allegations promptly and impartially, prosecute those responsible, and provide victims with shelters, legal aid, counselling and reintegration support.
The issue sits inside a wider pattern of pressure on religious minorities in Pakistan. In July 2025, UN experts separately warned of “widespread impunity” for violence and discrimination against minorities, including the Ahmadi community, and said attacks, arbitrary arrests and harassment were continuing amid what they called hostility and advocacy of hatred. Taken together, the statements suggest the UN sees the forced conversion of minority girls not as a stand-alone issue, but as part of a broader climate of insecurity and unequal protection under the law.
Pakistan has, for years, faced calls from rights groups, church leaders and UN mechanisms to tighten protections for minority girls. The latest statement adds pressure at a sensitive moment, because it frames the issue not as a cultural dispute or a handful of family cases, but as a recurring human-rights failure with a clear pattern: vulnerable girls disappear, consent is contested, ages are disputed, and justice often arrives late or not at all.
