Lahore: Levelling charges of ‘anti-state activities’, a top Pakistani woman lawyer and human rights activist was detained for hours and stopped from taking a flight to the UK by the immigration authorities at the airport yesterday.
The activist-lawyer Jalila Haider supports the minority Hazara community in the country was detained citing her “anti-state activities,” TribuneIndia reports.
Lawyer Haider was listed among the 100 most inspiring and influential women across the world by the BBC last year.
She was on her way to board a flight to the UK to attend a conference on feminism organized by the University of Sussex when the immigration authorities intervened and informed her that was on the no-fly list because of her “anti-state activities”.
The talented lawyer hails from Balochistan and belongs to the minority Hazara community. She is also the founder of ‘We The Humans’. She told that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) had detained her for seven hours at the airport and later returned her passport, informing that she can take another flight to the UK.
She added that she had not been involved in any “anti-state activity”.
She is also vocal about the persecution of the minority Hazaras in the Muslim-majority country.
According to sources, she went on a hunger strike in the year 2018, demanding the state to address the violence against the people of the Hazara community, who she said faced persecution due to ethnicity and sectarianism.
Haider had demanded Army Chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa to visit Balochistan and console the thousands of widows and orphaned children left by the killing of Hazaras in Pakistan over the past two decades, the daily said.