A presidential waiver has saved Pakistan from economic sanctions by the United States (US) after recently being placed among countries that allegedly violate religious freedom.
On 2 December, the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, had nominated Pakistan as one of the ten ‘Countries of Particular Concern’ (CPC) under its International Religious Freedom Act which includes Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, Nigeria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
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On Wednesday, the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Samuel D. Brownback, briefed the media on America’s actions against religious freedom violators and announced specific sanctions and dual-hatted sanctions for Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, and North Korea to satisfy the International Religious Freedom Act’s presidential action requirement.
However, Brown announced that certain countries, including Pakistan, have been granted a special Presidential Waiver due to matters of national security.
“Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan have been given a waiver for the presidential action requirement, determining that there were important national interests of the United States, requiring the exercise of the waiver authority,” he announced.
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Meanwhile, the report had no mention of either Israel’s atrocities in Palestine or India’s treatment of its minorities in general and its Muslim and Dalit minorities in particular.
Pakistan’s Foreign Office (FO) rejected the report as ‘arbitrary and selective assessment’. It also stated that the credibility of the process was dubious while citing the “glaring omission of India from the blacklist”.
The FO added that the report had overlooked “the fact that Pakistan and the US have been constructively engaging on the subject at the bilateral level”.