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Activist Gulalai Ismail 'escapes' to New York, applies for political asylum

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Rights activist Gulalai Ismail escaped Pakistani authorities last month and has reached the United States, where she has applied for political asylum, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

The US publication said that the 32-year-old is currently residing with her sister in Brooklyn, New York.

She has not disclosed how she managed to leave the country. All she revealed was: “I didn’t fly out of any airport.”

“I can’t tell you any more,” NYT quoted her as saying during an interview. “My exit story will put many lives at risk.”

According to NYT, no government officials were willing to make a public comment on the matter. Security officials said that they had suspected Ismail had left the country.

In November last year, the Islamabad High Court was informed that Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had recommended putting Ismail’s name on the Exit Control List (ECL) for her alleged anti-state activities abroad.

Following a petition by Ismail challenging the government’s decision to put her name on the ECL, the Islamabad High Court had ordered the removal of her name from the list.

The court, however, had allowed the interior ministry to take appropriate action, including confiscation of her passport, in the light of recommendations made by ISI.

According to the NYT report, Ismail had remained a fugitive since late May. "Security services were searching for her in every corner of the country, raiding her friends’ houses and closing in on her family," it said.

The report added that Ismail is still worried about her parents in Islamabad "who face charges of financing terrorism and remain under heavy surveillance".

In recent days, she has reportedly met with various "human rights defenders" in the US and staffs of congressional leaders.

“I will do everything I can to support Gulalai’s asylum request,” said Senator Charles Schumer, a member of the Democrat Party in New York. “It is clear that her life would be in danger if she were to return to Pakistan.”

Ismail has launched a research and advocacy group called Voices for Peace and Democracy aimed at protecting women in the conflict-hit zones of the world. "She is also thinking of law school," reported NYT.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1506129/a...apes-to-new-york-applies-for-political-asylum
 
So she pulled all that drama to get into a ministerial position with PML-N and failing that she wants to move to the US?
 
This is the big blow to pakistan just before this UN assembly meeting ! If pakistan points some 'human right voilations in kashmir' against India then Indian diplomats will have chance to point out this. Rest of the world will say 'please sit and resolve these disputes and don't bring these things to UN'...

Hence pakistan's argument of curfew, human rights voilation in kashmir got neutralized even before the meeting !
 
This is the big blow to pakistan just before this UN assembly meeting ! If pakistan points some 'human right voilations in kashmir' against India then Indian diplomats will have chance to point out this. Rest of the world will say 'please sit and resolve these disputes and don't bring these things to UN'...

Hence pakistan's argument of curfew, human rights voilation in kashmir got neutralized even before the meeting !

Ignorant Indian Logic : One person = 8 Million people
 
This is the big blow to pakistan just before this UN assembly meeting ! If pakistan points some 'human right voilations in kashmir' against India then Indian diplomats will have chance to point out this. Rest of the world will say 'please sit and resolve these disputes and don't bring these things to UN'...

Hence pakistan's argument of curfew, human rights voilation in kashmir got neutralized even before the meeting !

Lol. As dumb as it gets. By any chance does your brain function?
 
Well she is just in time to run for Afghan elections
 
This is the big blow to pakistan just before this UN assembly meeting ! If pakistan points some 'human right voilations in kashmir' against India then Indian diplomats will have chance to point out this. Rest of the world will say 'please sit and resolve these disputes and don't bring these things to UN'...

Hence pakistan's argument of curfew, human rights voilation in kashmir got neutralized even before the meeting !

Lmao how hard are you trying here 🤣
 
Lmao how hard are you trying here ��

Lol. As dumb as it gets. By any chance does your brain function?

Ignorant Indian Logic : One person = 8 Million people



Bhagwaan ke krupa sey my brain is functioning really well. You will find out after sept 28th when UN assembly will be over. Nothing will come out of this meeting (even u knew it deep in ur heart) and no one in this world (including US, China) can keep any sort of pressure on India to make necessary changes to kashmir Period .
 
Bhagwaan ke krupa sey my brain is functioning really well. You will find out after sept 28th when UN assembly will be over. Nothing will come out of this meeting (even u knew it deep in ur heart) and no one in this world (including US, China) can keep any sort of pressure on India to make necessary changes to kashmir Period .

I don’t think Pakistan expects any world power to force India to leave Kashmir. It’s more about building a narrative tbh.
 
ISLAMABAD: An additional district and sessions court on Tuesday issued non-bailable arrest warrants for activist Gulalai Ismail in a case related to maligning national institutions.

The court issued the order that if the suspect does not appear before the court on Oct 21, the process to declare her a proclaimed offender could be initiated.

The activist reportedly mysteriously escaped from Pakistan after her passport was confiscated and is currently seeking political asylum in the United States.

In March this year, the Islamabad High Court, while hearing her petition, directed the interior ministry to remove her name from the Exit Control List (ECL).

The court, however, allowed the interior ministry to take appropriate action against her, including the confiscation of her passport, based on the recommendations by the Inter-Services Intelligence.

In November last year, the IHC was informed that the ISI recommended putting the rights activist’s name on the ECL for her alleged anti-state activities abroad.

In her petition, she sought the retrieval of her passport and travel documents which the Federal Investigation Agency had confiscated upon her arrival in Pakistan on Oct 12 when she was detained at the FIA’s office in Islamabad’s Sector G-13.

According to the petition, Ms Ismail is the chairperson of non-governmental organisation “Aware Girls” and has received national and international acclaim for her work on empowering Pakistani women.

The petition said that the FIA had on Oct 12 detained her when she returned from the UK in connection with her alleged association with the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement and for allegedly “delivering anti-state speeches”.

Ms Ismail argued in her petition that the federal government placed her name on the ECL and the FIA confiscated her passport without giving her an opportunity to defend herself.

She requested the court to order the removal of her name from the ECL and return her passport.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1508489/court-issues-non-bailable-arrest-warrants-for-activist
 
It seems the western media can’t get enough of this lady:

How much of what she says is true?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Being forced to leave her own country for speaking out against the military – this is the story of <a href="https://twitter.com/Gulalai_Ismail?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Gulalai_Ismail</a>, the women's rights activist and a fugitive on Pakistan's most wanted list: <a href="https://t.co/CI3OIRC2rs">pic.twitter.com/CI3OIRC2rs</a></p>— DW News (@dwnews) <a href="https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1179754890387771394?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 3, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Gulalai Ismail — a Pakistani women's rights activist who fled after being threatened for speaking out about sexual violence perpetrated by security forces — has reappeared in New York.<br><br>She recently spoke with NPR about her journey, and what's next.<a href="https://t.co/oqTcNeUvtL">https://t.co/oqTcNeUvtL</a></p>— NPR (@NPR) <a href="https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1179698870047166464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 3, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
 
Dissent is sedition, dissent is treason. Worst times in South Asia imho.
 
when a fugitive person runaway from a country without passport and visa, thats mean he/she is working with some International agencies ....
 
when a fugitive person runaway from a country without passport and visa, thats mean he/she is working with some International agencies ....

Yes... absolutely what India keeps saying about Masood Azhar lol.
 
Gulai Ismail’s father sent on 14-day judicial remand

Rights activist Gulalai Ismail's father, Professor Muhammad Ismail, was sent to jail on 14-day judicial remand on Friday, a day after his daughter alleged that he had been picked up from outside the Peshawar High Court (PHC) by "men wearing Malitia (sic) dress".

Professor Ismail's lawyer, Fazal Khan, told DawnNewsTV that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Peshawar had arrested his client after registering a First Information Report (FIR) against him under the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act (Peca) 2016.

Khan said that his client was produced before judicial magistrate Naveedullah today, where the court rejected FIA's request for physical remand and instead sent him on a 14-day judicial remand. He added that they would soon file a bail application.

The lawyer said that on Thursday his client was at the PHC for another case.

"At around 4:30pm he left the high court building and was picked up by some unknown men and shifted to [an] unknown location," Khan claimed.

Case registered

The FIR, a copy of which was seen by Dawn.com, was registered against Professor Ismail under Sections 10 and 11 of Peca 2016 read with Section 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code at FIA Cyber Crime Circle in Peshawar.

The case was registered after a complaint was received against Ismail by persons namely Sajid Iqbal, Ali Ahmad, Riazur Rehman and Walid Mir on October 8.

“The complaint is regarding ... hate speech and fake information against government institutions of Pakistan on Facebook and Twitter,” according to the FIR.

It said the professor's Facebook and Twitter IDs, passwords and a mobile phone were seized by the FIA.

US 'concerned'

Earlier on Friday, Gulalai via Twitter said she had received information that her father had been brought to the court premises.

On Friday morning, US Assistant Secretary of State Alice G. Wells, who is also the in-charge of South Asia affairs at the US State Department, had expressed concern over "reports of the continued harassment" of Gulalai's family and her father's detention.

"We encourage Pakistan to uphold citizens’ rights to peaceful assembly, expression, and due process," Wells said in a post shared on Twitter.

In September, the New York Times reported, Gulalai escaped Pakistani authorities the previous month and had reached the United States, where she applied for political asylum.

Gulalai is an international award-winning activist and a prominent member of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) group who had been campaigning for the rights of women and the ethnic Pashtun minority.

She had not disclosed how she managed to leave the country. All she revealed was: "I didn’t fly out of any airport."

"I can’t tell you any more," NYT quoted her as saying during an interview. "My exit story will put many lives at risk."

According to NYT, no government officials were willing to make a public comment on the matter. Security officials had said that they had suspected Gulalai had left the country.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1512843/gulalai-ismails-father-sent-on-14-day-judicial-remand
 
NEW DELHI — Gulalai Ismail, one of Pakistan’s boldest human rights defenders and a stalwart critic of Pakistan’s security services, succeeded in escaping an enormous dragnet and making it to the United States in 2019, deeply humiliating the authorities who had been persecuting her.

Now Pakistan has taken aim at her parents, accusing them of terrorism, and throwing her father, who was recovering from Covid-19, into jail.

On Tuesday, a bail hearing ended with Mohammed Ismail, Ms. Ismail’s 65-year-old father, being led away in handcuffs. He faces charges of sedition and terrorism financing, which human rights defenders say are bogus and thinly veiled revenge against the family for embarrassing the state security services.

During the hunt for Ms. Ismail in 2019, the Pakistani government deployed undercover agents, abducted and tortured family friends to extract information, and circulated pictures of her face at airports and police stations, her family members and supporters said.

But Ms. Ismail outwitted them, moving from place to place all across Pakistan, never using a phone or touching a computer and covering her face for the few moments when she did step outside, she said. Security officials later admitted they were frustrated that she had managed to slip out of the country.

On the Run:How Gulalai Ismail escaped to the United States.
Ms. Ismail, who now lives in New York and has applied for political asylum in the United States, said the charges against her and her parents were “malicious and false.”

“This is about setting a precedent,” she said on Wednesday, by phone from Brooklyn. “If a woman raises her voice, the whole family will face consequences.”

Ms. Ismail made a name for herself by spotlighting the rampant abuse of women and girls in Pakistan, especially gang rapes perpetuated by government soldiers. She also joined the Pashtun Protection Movement, a human rights protest group known as the P.T.M., and whose rallies became the focus of a massive crackdown by the Pakistani security forces.

Pakistan is a shaky state, still mostly dominated by the military despite having an elected Parliament and civilian government. Rights activists say that what has happened to Ms. Ismail and her family is a casebook study in how allergic Pakistan remains to dissent and how vicious the security services can be to those who challenge them.

After Ms. Ismail criticized the Pakistani military, the authorities accused her of treason. And then, not long after she escaped their dragnet and turned up in New York City, security agents began closing in on her parents back home.

Her father, a retired Urdu language professor, kept up a text message correspondence with a New York Times reporter until he was taken to jail on Tuesday. His messages revealed his strident side and a sense of growing anxiety.

“Just now at 1:45 a.m. some armed persons came in two vehicles,” he texted on Oct. 17, 2019, from his home in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. “I refused to come out and told them if they are policemen then they should come in daytime.”

He added: “They are desperate and they want to know how did Gulalai arrive in USA.”

(Ms. Ismail has yet to reveal how she made it out of Pakistan, except to say, “I didn’t fly out of any airport.”)

By mid 2020, the Pakistani authorities were building a terrorism case against her father and mother, Uzlifat, 59. Officials accused Ms. Ismail and her father of funneling weapons to terrorists who carried out a 2013 suicide attack on a Sunday service on a church that killed at least 73 worshipers, and providing the vehicle used in a 2015 attack on a Shiite mosque that killed more than 20 people, according to a copy of a court document shared with The Times.

The Pakistani Taliban, the country’s most active banned terrorist group, has claimed responsibility for both attacks.

Throughout the past six months, Ms. Ismail’s parents have shuffled in and out of court, even as Mr. Ismail’s health began to fail. “I have fever, throat infection, cough, headache and high blood pressure but have to stand in High Court Peshawar,” he texted in late November.

A few days later, he and his wife tested positive for Covid-19.

“The puppet courts are responsible for our sufferings,” he said in another message.

In contemporary Pakistan, there has been little room for political dissent. Former leaders have been jailed or hounded out. Prime Minister Imran Khan, once an internationally famous cricket star, is widely seen as being under the thumb of the military establishment, which has been running shadow wars for years, alternately working with or against various militant groups, including the Afghan Taliban insurgency.

In this atmosphere, many human rights activists have disappeared into the hands of the security services while well-known terrorists move around untouched.

“In Pakistan, banned terrorist outfits are in fact not banned and roam freely,” said Afrasiab Khattak, a veteran politician and a former member of Parliament. “But people who always raised voices against banned outfits for their barbarism have been punished in baseless cases.”

Just last week, in fact, Pakistan’s highest court ordered the release of Ahmed Omar Sheikh, a British national and militant, who had been convicted of being the mastermind behind the 2002 kidnapping and beheading of Daniel Pearl, a celebrated Wall Street Journal reporter. Many countries, including the United States, had been exerting enormous pressure on Pakistan to keep Mr. Sheikh in jail.

In the case of the Ismail family, one court in July 2020 threw out the charges against Ms. Ismail’s parents, saying there was no evidence. But the government didn’t give up. By September, the authorities had leveled new allegations of sedition, conspiracy and terrorism against Ms. Gulalai and her parents.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent monitoring group, said in a statement this week that the case against Ms. Ismail’s father and the “interminable cycle of ludicrous charges, arrests and court dates are nothing more than heavy-handed tactics targeting his daughter — a respected rights activist.”

Ms. Ismail, 34, credits her father with instilling in her a strong sense of right and wrong. He is a veteran dissident, in and out of jail at least five times before, going back more than 20 years ago, when he began speaking out against the Taliban. In October 2019, he spent more than 30 days behind bars on allegations of maligning the government.

His views have constantly rubbed the Pakistani authorities the wrong way. In a recent court session, a judge questioned him about why he wrote on Twitter that Pakistan wasn’t a real state.

His response: “I told him: Go to political science and study the definition of a state, and if I am wrong, then kill me.”

After threatening multiple times to cancel his bail, a judge in Peshawar on Tuesday followed through, sending him into police custody for at least three days for more questioning.

Ms. Ismail said she struggles with guilt, sometimes asking herself: “Was it all worth it? Should I have put my family in such a situation?”

But she said, “I couldn’t have chosen any other life. We can’t stay silent.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/world/asia/pakistan-gulalai-ismail-father.html
 
I think the best way to deal with people like these is to ignore them and not give them any space. State tries to put them in their place and that just makes them martyrs and 'defenders of democracy' in the eyes of the West. When in reality they are just seditious opportunists.

Let them say what they ant to say. The moment you give these people attention and give them a story to tell, which they can then twist into one about how they were repressed by the state, then they become heroes in the eyes of the West.
 
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