Shaun
Pakistan has again arrested Mahrang Baloch, a prominent champion of human rights for the country’s ethnic Baloch minority, and barred her lawyer from visiting her in jail.
“She was looking weak and stressed,” her sister Nadia Baloch told TIME on Monday after being allowed a few minutes with the activist in Quetta’s Hudda District Prison, where she has been held since Saturday. Mahrang Baloch’s lawyer was not allowed in; nor was the food her family had brought. “Our greatest fear is that she will be given contaminated food—or worse, something harmful,” Nadia Baloch said.
The circumstances of Mahrang Baloch’s arrest illustrate both the complexities and the risks of her work for the Balochis. The ethnic group, whose population is often put at between 10 and 15 million, resides on arid lands divided by the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan.
Like the Kurds, whose historic homeland was arrayed among several Middle Eastern states when nation states were being drawn, many Balochis want more autonomy, if not a state of their own—and some have taken up arms. Pakistan’s Balochistan province has seen decades of conflict between the separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and a heavily militarized state. The latest clash, on March 11, appeared to mark a dramatic new level in its guerrilla and terror operations when a BLA force hijacked a train, resulting in scores of deaths.
Pakistan’s response to the insurgency has been a decades-long “dirty war” that has left thousands of Balochi citizens missing and presumed dead. Mahrang Baloch founded the Baloch Yekjehti [Solidarity] Committee to advocate for a political future grounded in recognition of human rights, including ascertaining the fates of the disappeared. The state has not engaged, however.
After the hijacking of the Jaffar Express, state security forces ramped up pressure on Balochi human rights advocates, detaining several Solidarity activists in Quetta, the Balochistan provincial capital. On Friday, state forces opened fire on protesters who had assembled to demand their release, killing three. Mahrang Baloch was arrested the next day at a sit-in where protesters had assembled with the bodies of the victims.
“She is quite strong. She will not give up on this,” said Imran Baloch, her attorney, who like many Balochis uses Baloch as a surname but is no relation. The lawyer said the state clearly feels threatened by Mahrang’s increasing prominence, noting that it escalated against her in October after she was included in the TIME100 Next list of the world’s emerging leaders. Mahrang learned that she had been placed on a no-fly list and her passport had been suspended only when she was turned away from her flight to New York to attend a TIME event. Her lawyer said she also felt “pressurized” by the state after she was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
“There is a complex web of violence and human-rights violations in Balochistan that creates a very challenging environment for human-rights defenders, particularly women human-rights defenders, working on issues of enforced disappearance,” Sarah de Roure, the global head of protection at the advocacy group Front Line Defenders, told TIME in October, after Mahrang was detained at the Karachi airport.
“She is being targeted as a woman, she is being targeted as a Baloch woman, because of the work that she’s doing, which is publicly speaking on the issue of enforced disappearance—initially around her own family, and then as part of a broader movement.”
