Shoaib used to run a small shop on the edge of a dusty road in Panjgur district of Balochistan. Money was always tight and the electricity often failed. Every evening, Shoaib’s family would discuss stories about friends and fellow Baloch people who had gone missing.
Shoaib is a pseudonym; his family requested that his real name be withheld because they fear his being identified could endanger them, even in the United Kingdom.
Shoaib always believed that if he kept his head down and maintained a quiet life, he could continue to support his wife, mother, and three sisters, and raise his four children in peace. That is, until the night when men in uniforms came without a warrant, pushed his mother and wife aside, hooded him, and drove him away while the children cried.
Since that night, there has been no official record of his detention, no charge, and no court hearing, only silence and fear. His family has now fled to the United Kingdom, where they sit in a crowded asylum-seekers’ hotel, in a country that currently doesn’t feel welcoming to people like Shoaib’s family.
Over decades, enforced disappearances in Balochistan have become normalized. They are rooted in the relationship between a resource-rich province and a central state that has relied heavily on security responses to deal with political demands. Earlier cycles of rebellion and crackdowns have created a norm in which Baloch people disappear as a method to intimidate them into silence. These disappearances are largely carried out by Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, as documented by domestic and international human rights groups.
In 2021, even the Islamabad High Court called the practice out, saying that the federal government bears ultimate responsibility for protecting citizens from “the most heinous crime” of enforced disappearance. Yet, despite such strong court language, the practice continues and accountability remains elusive.
In recent years, human rights monitors have continued to record large numbers of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Even official bodies within Pakistan’s government have acknowledged the scale of the disaster. According to Pakistan’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, about 3,000 people have gone missing since 2011 in Balochistan. The Human Rights Council of Balochistan recorded 601 enforced disappearances and 525 killings in 2023, and 830 enforced disappearances and 480 killings in 2024 – of these 278 individuals could be identified, while the remaining 202 remained unidentified, highlighting the severe limitations in access, investigation, and accountability.
Families like Shoaib’s are still being broken apart in great numbers, while many cases likely go unreported due to intimidation, and the constant threat of reprisals.
Enforced disappearance – when a person is taken by state agents or those acting with state support, followed by a denial of custody – is a crime under international law. This combination removes the victim from legal protection and leaves families trapped in painful uncertainty, with no clear office or authority to turn to for answers about their loved one. In Balochistan, this is done as part of Pakistan’s counterinsurgency efforts. People are taken from their homes, but also from public markets and roads, then kept without contact for weeks or months. Later, some are reported dead after so-called “encounters” that many in Balochistan, including human rights groups, call a “kill-and-dump” policy.
Many international human rights groups attribute these abductions to Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps and the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD). The Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) shield these operations by using sweeping counterterrorism powers granted by the state’s permissive laws to detain suspects without charge and keep cases in the dark.
In Pakistan, the authorities routinely invoke the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 and public-order laws to detain protesters and rights defenders. In June 2025, the situation worsened, with Balochistan passing the Anti-Terrorism (Balochistan Amendment) Act, 2025, which inserted Section 11-EEEE, allowing the provincial government, a notified “detaining authority,” and, where Section 4 is invoked, the armed forces, civil armed forces, and intelligence agencies to order preventive detention for up to three months on “reasonable suspicion.” People detained under the laws will be held in designated detention centers. The amendment will be valid for six years and is extendable by another two years.
This tightening of the law sits on top of something deeper. Balochistan is also suffering from long social and economic neglect. The province has the lowest literacy rate in Pakistan, about 42 percent in the 2023 census, and very high multidimensional poverty that the U.N. Development Program has placed at roughly 71 percent. People feel forgotten by a state that takes gas, talks about minerals, and uses the coastline, but does not invest in their lives.
Pakistan’s largest gas field was discovered in the 1950s in Sui Balochistan. It has fueled the nation’s industries, yet today a large share of local people in the region still lack household gas connections. This inequality is one key reason people in Balochistan protest, but the answer they get from Pakistan’s central government is military raids and forced disappearance of people raising their voices.
In the present era, epitomized by the race for minerals, the situation is replaying itself. Pakistan has pitched a new minerals export terminal at Pasni, on the Baloch coast, to U.S. investors; although it is not official yet, the target area is still Balochistan. And a U.S. company (U.S. Strategic Metals) has signed a $500 million MoU in Islamabad, including a polymetallic refinery, with news of an initial shipment already sent to the United States.
The insertion of Section 11-EEEE into the Anti-Terrorism Act is not an abstract legal change; it is an instrument built for this moment. It is a law that allows the government to suppress any further protests and calls for equal distribution of the region’s mineral wealth. It’s a tool for the government to use when it wants quiet roads for big trucks and no cameras when protesters block them.
The sad truth is the world is too quiet about this. Human rights violations do not have equal attention everywhere; in Balochistan that reality is once again the case. U.N. Special Rapporteurs and working groups have warned about the “unrelenting use of enforced disappearances” in Balochistan and asked Pakistan to criminalize the practice, investigate independently, and ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
U.N. mechanisms issue recommendations and letters, but they can’t enforce compliance. Without a real political cost, such calls alone rarely motivated change or fix the problems.
In line with the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, a state must not hide behind “security” to enable extraction, and any company working on minerals, ports, or refineries must carry out full human rights due diligence. Where abuses are severe and cannot be stopped by companies alone, they should responsibly stop doing business in the affected region. Likewise, any state such as the U.S., currently in talks with Pakistan for economic deals, should also tie support and agreements to clear human rights improvements in the areas where its companies operate.
If these baselines are not met, others like Shoaib will continue to disappear while those responsible do not care and face no consequences.
Every evening, light fades through the curtains of the asylum-seekers’ hotel room where Shoaib’s mother, his wife, and his four children are now staying, sharing his memories between them. It is painfully clear that enforced disappearance is not only a legal term or a statistic; it is a hole in every affected family’s daily life. There is no hand to hold at a school interview, no voice to calm a frightened child, no body to mourn at a funeral. Shoaib’s wife is lost in the knots of the U.K.’s complex asylum process, his children wake at every knock on the door, and his mother listens as rumors come and go, wishing a truth might come in between.
This is the price paid by thousands of Baloch families. Oppressive security laws and secret detentions are being used to silence people who have only asked for fair treatment on their own land.
Until these forced disappearances stop, until laws like Section 11-EEEE are rolled back, and until deals are written with real consent and real accountability, any sort of “development” plan in Balochistan will read to its people as a threat, not a promise for a better life. The costs should not fall on families like Shoaib’s; the world must raise the cost for those who disappear them.