QUETTA, BALOCHISTAN: Sammi Deen Baloch, the central leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), has said that Muhammad Bakhsh Sajidi, Rafiq Baloch, and Naeem Sajidi have been forcibly disappeared for the past three months for no reason other than being family members of Dr. Naseem Baloch.
In a statement, Sammi Deen Baloch said the three men have been held without any legal justification, with their only apparent crime being their kinship with Dr. Naseem Baloch. She described the practice as a deliberate and calculated use of collective punishment, a tool she said the state has been deploying with increasing frequency and confidence across Balochistan.
She said that family members of activists and political figures are being targeted through multiple methods enforced disappearances, placement on the fourth schedule under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act, and being coerced into holding press conferences against their will. The provincial government’s open endorsement of such practices, she argued, has only emboldened those carrying them out.
Sammi Deen Baloch invoked international law in her condemnation, citing the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both of which explicitly prohibit the punishment of individuals on the basis of their family ties or associations. She stressed that under these internationally recognised legal frameworks, no person can be held accountable solely because of their relationship with another individual.
She went further, saying that Pakistan is not only violating these international principles in practice but has also introduced domestic legal provisions that effectively legitimise collective punishment within its own legal framework a development she described as deeply alarming and without precedent in a state that claims to uphold the rule of law.
The BYC leader called for the immediate and unconditional release of Muhammad Bakhsh Sajidi, Rafiq Baloch, and Naeem Sajidi, stressing that their continued disappearance is a direct violation of both Pakistani and international law.
