On 25 March 2026, UNPO joined a side event at the 61st session of the UN Human Rights Council on the rights of minorities in Asia, alongside the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues and the World Sindhi Congress. Two days later, on 27 March, UNPO’s Secretary-General also participated in a conference focused on Balochistan, bringing the same core message into a space shaped by lived experience: exclusion is not a side issue, it is a root cause -and accountability is a long process that requires preparation, protection, and persistence.
The Human Rights Council discussion was grounded in the Special Rapporteur’s thematic report, “Addressing Minority Issues Through Their Root Causes.” The report offers a clear framework, by identifying the main issues confronting minorities – including extermination, exclusion, invisibilisation, discrimination, and marginalisation – and tracing them back to their root causes such as nation-building around dominant identities, colonial legacies, and enduring social hierarchies. The event focused particularly on Pakistan, where these dynamics continue to shape how minorities experience state power, political representation, and access to protection.
The framework was made tangible through the specific, lived experiences and realities shared by speakers representing the Baloch and Sindhi peoples. They spoke of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings; restrictions on cultural and linguistic expression; forced conversions; land dispossession; environmental degradation; and chronic water mismanagement. A pattern can be observed in the prevalence of these “minority issues”. Communities are denied meaningful participation in decisions affecting their lives, and the costs of that exclusion accumulate across generations – politically, socially, culturally, and economically.
UNPO’s Secretary-General used her intervention to connect these experiences to what UNPO has observed for 35 years across unrepresented nations and peoples worldwide. The exclusion of minorities and unrepresented peoples from meaningful participation is not an isolated phenomenon, but the result of systemic historical and political processes, including “the legacy of nation-building around dominant identities, and unfinished or uneven processes of decolonisation”. When peoples are denied the ability to participate on equal terms – nationally and internationally – self-determination is denied in practice. UNPO’s approach is consistent across contexts: self-determination is not about prescribing a single political outcome, but about the process of enabling peoples to participate equally in decisions that shape their political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental futures.
From that starting point, the link to accountability becomes clearer. When exclusion is structural, violations are rarely accidental. They become part of a system, normalised through securitisation, impunity, and the shrinking of civic space. And when civic space is restricted, accountability becomes harder not only to achieve, but even to prepare. The ability to document violations, protect witnesses and defenders, access independent mechanisms, and sustain international attention are all conditions that can be deliberately weakened. In many places, including Sindh and Balochistan, those conditions are precisely what communities and human rights defenders are struggling to preserve.
This message carried directly into the Baloch conference on 27 March “Balochistan: 78 Years of Occupation, Human Rights Abuses, and the Failure of International Accountability”. Speaking in a space dedicated to Balochistan’s situation and the failure of international accountability, UNPO reiterated that the international system remains deeply state-centric. States sitting at the UN do not always represent the diversity within their borders, and in many cases actively exclude and target peoples and minorities. This reality leaves communities without meaningful avenues to be heard, to influence decisions, or to seek redress, even when violations are well documented.
In that context, UNPO stressed the importance of maintaining non-violent, rights-based approaches. This is not a matter of idealism. In asymmetrical contexts, violence raises the cost for communities and can undermine the prospects of a just and sustainable outcome. The more difficult question – especially when exhaustion and isolation grow – is how to keep moving forward without losing direction or cohesion.
The Secretary-General framed hope not as optimism or denial, but as an active decision to keep building the conditions for change. Documentation, testimony preservation, community organising, alliances, and consistent advocacy often happen outside the spotlight—but they are the groundwork that makes accountability possible when political openings emerge. Accountability, she argued, is rarely a single moment; it is often the result of years of sustained effort – a marathon, where different actors carry different roles over time: leading, sustaining, preserving memory, preparing what comes next.
A key part of that preparation is coalition-building across communities. UNPO highlighted that stronger coordination and alliances, including between Baloch and Sindhi actors, and among wider minority communities, are not secondary to political change. They are what helps ensure that no community is isolated, scapegoated, manipulated, or traded away in political bargaining, and that future opportunities are met with clarity of demands and collective strength.
Inclusion is a condition for peace – not just a matter of rights. When peoples are recognised as equal actors in shaping their future, the foundations for accountability and durable stability become possible. When they are shut out, violations follow, impunity takes hold, and instability deepens. That conviction ran through both engagements, at the Human Rights Council and at the Baloch conference, and it remains at the centre of UNPO’s work.
UNPO will continue to work alongside its members and partners to support human rights defenders, strengthen documentation efforts, build strategic alliances, and advocate for a multilateral system capable of hearing, protecting, and representing peoples, not only states.
