EVERY few years, Pakistan holds its breath over a single acronym and every few years, it exhales as if the danger has passed. GSP has survived four review cycles this way: alarm, negotiation, renewal, amnesia. This time the pattern is breaking and not because Brussels has grown harsher for sport. From January 2027, monitoring and forgiveness are no longer enough. Pakistan will have to formally re-apply and submit a written plan of action. Brussels has already signalled how that will be judged: in April, the EU’s own ambassador told Islamabad that continued access is “neither guaranteed nor automatic.” The country assessment published this July is the baseline against which that application will be measured.

Reading across the commentary this scheme has generated over the past year, three different stories are being told about the same facts and the gap between them is revealing. One camp, closer to the government’s framing, points to a genuine decade of reform: a National Commission for Minorities, a narrowed death penalty, an Anti-Torture Act and a monitoring mission given full access last November. A second camp counters that legislative motion is not lived change, citing enforced disappearances, restrictions on journalists and misuse........

© Pakistan Observer