Pakistan is using the EU’s GSP+ trade perks as cover for repression and mass surveillance, and the EU should enforce rights-based conditions or suspend the benefits.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” J. Robert Oppenheimer reached for the Gita to capture the terror of an invention turned against its creators’ intent. Pakistan’s use of the European Union’s GSP+ regime is a smaller but chilling echo of that turn. A program meant to bind trade to progress on human rights has, in practice, been repurposed to excuse retrogression. Instead of incentivizing reforms, GSP+ has become the soft cushion beneath hard-edged repression—surveillance of citizens, the silencing of dissent, and the persecution of religious minorities.

The paradox is stark. GSP+—the EU’s Generalized System of Preferences Plus—offers expanded market access in exchange for concrete commitments on human rights, labor standards, environmental protection, and good governance. Yet in Pakistan, the benefits have not translated into consistent institutional progress. The state still enforces harsh blasphemy laws; attacks on Ahmadis and Christians persist; and digital surveillance constricts free expression. Rather than leveraging trade to drive reform, Brussels has too often looked the other way, allowing the economic lifeline to function as a form of political life support.

Consider enforced disappearances. The practice took firmer root during Pervez Musharraf’s military rule and has lingered through successive governments, with security services repeatedly implicated. Humanitarian organizations estimate that more than 5,000 people have vanished. Military courts—by their nature ill-suited to protect due process—have convicted roughly 80 civilians for their alleged roles in the 2023 riots, a move widely criticized as incompatible with Pakistan’s obligations under international law. The EU has condemned the military trials multiple times over the past year—yet the trade preferences remain, unruffled.

Repression has also migrated into the circuitry of daily life. According to Amnesty International, Pakistan has constructed one of the most advanced surveillance architectures in the world, drawing on tools from both China and the West. The system’s outlines surfaced publicly in 2024, when a case before the Islamabad High Court—filed by Bushra Bibi, the wife of former Prime Minister Imran Khan—followed the leak of her private phone calls. Security agencies denied they tap phones. But under questioning, the national telecoms regulator admitted it had ordered carriers to install a Lawful Interception Management System (LIMS) for “designated services.” In plain language: bulk interception at scale.

Scale is the point. LIMS enables the monitoring of at least four million mobile phones at once. In tandem, a national web-filter—an upgraded firewall sometimes referred to as WMS 2.0—can simultaneously block roughly two million active Internet sessions. Pakistan has reportedly blocked some 650,000 URLs and has repeatedly throttled or shuttered access to platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and X. Ben Wagner, a professor of human rights and technology, calls the combination of mass call interception and population-wide Internet filtering a “worrying development,” for obvious reasons: it normalizes pre-emptive restrictions on speech and privacy.

The tools carry familiar brand names. Amnesty’s research points to a supply chain built from hardware and software sourced across borders: equipment from the American firm Niagara Networks; software from Thales DIS, a subsidiary of France’s Thales; servers made by a Chinese state-owned IT company; and, in earlier iterations, infrastructure from Canada’s Sandvine. The firewall itself is linked to China’s Geedge Networks. The effect is to globalize the anatomy of domestic control: Western and Chinese technology, integrated into a single apparatus of suppression.

Nowhere is the human cost more visible than in Balochistan. The province—long restive and chronically underserved—endures rolling Internet blackouts, targeted content restrictions, and arrests of activists. Paank, the human-rights arm of the Baloch National Movement, has urged the EU to reassess Pakistan’s GSP+ status, arguing that a state cannot enjoy trade advantages while prosecuting a quiet war against its own citizens. The Anti-Terrorism Balochistan Amendment Bill 2025 grants sweeping powers to police, intelligence services, and the military to detain individuals on mere suspicion for up to three months—renewable—without robust judicial checks. Prominent Baloch activists, including Mahrang Baloch, Gulzadi Baloch, Beebow Baloch, Sibghat Ullah Baloch, and Beeberg Baloch, have remained behind bars even after court appearances, a fact that illustrates how easily due process can be bent to the will of the security state.

This is how a rights-for-market access bargain becomes a rights-lite subsidy. In theory, GSP+ conditions should trigger scrutiny and, if necessary, suspension. In practice, they risk becoming a compliance pantomime. The EU issues statements; Pakistan issues denials; the surveillance grid hums on. Meanwhile, minorities test the limits of their safety in courtrooms and on sidewalks; journalists and activists calibrate sentences to dodge censors and filters; and citizens learn the slow self-censorship that sets in when every device can be a listening post.

The defense offered by Islamabad is familiar: national security demands monitoring; social stability requires curbing “misuse” of speech; courts provide remedies where abuses occur. But a rights-based order presumes that security powers are constrained by law and subject to independent oversight, not just rhetorical nods. Bulk interception cannot be squared with the principle of necessity and proportionality. Military trials of civilians cannot be squared with fair-trial guarantees. Detaining citizens on suspicion for months without meaningful review cannot be squared with even a minimalist understanding of liberty.

Nor can the EU wash its hands. Conditionality, to be meaningful, must bite. The GSP+ framework contains the tools to demand measurable progress: repeal or reform of laws weaponized against minorities; transparency around surveillance procurement and operations; civilian trials for civilians; and credible mechanisms to investigate disappearances and hold perpetrators to account. Tying tariff privileges to concrete milestones—time-bound, public, and independently verified—does not “politicize” trade. It restores the bargain that GSP+ was created to make: Europe’s market in exchange for universal rights, not despite them.

Immanuel Kant urged us to treat humanity “always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” In Pakistan’s GSP+ story, people—particularly minorities and activists—are too often treated as means: to consolidate authority, to pacify dissent, to reassure foreign partners that order reigns. The policy response should be the opposite. If GSP+ is to recover its moral core, the EU must insist on verifiable reforms or be prepared to suspend preferences. Anything less leaves Brussels complicit—another actor in the theater of “conditionality,” where the conditions never quite take effect.

The point is not to punish Pakistan’s people by shrinking its exports. The point is to make clear that rights are not an optional line item in trade policy. GSP+ can still be what it was meant to be: leverage for dignity. But that requires Europe to stop treating the program as a talisman and start using it as a tool.