ISLAMABAD // Pakistan will tighten oversight of aid groups and activists “working without any rules”, the interior minister said on Friday, as officials gave Save the Children 15 days to leave the country.
Police locked the gate of Save the Children’s office in Islamabad late on Thursday and posted a notice saying that the building was sealed.
Pakistan has toughened its stance against local and international NGOs in recent years, accusing them of using their work as a cover for espionage.
“International NGOs were working without any rules, regulations, agenda and law in Pakistan. For several years intelligence reports were being received but no action was taken,” interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said on Friday.
He added that parliament was debating whether to expose what he said were the “many” foreign non-governmental organisations bent on undermining Pakistan.
In a statement, Save the Children said it strongly objected to Pakistan’s action and was raising its “serious concerns at the highest levels”.
Save the Children has been in Pakistan for over 35 years and employs 1,200 local staff but has had run-ins with the government since 2011, when it was linked to a Pakistani doctor recruited by the CIA to help in the hunt that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.
The charity’s foreign staff were expelled from Pakistan soon after the accusations surfaced but more than 1,000 local staff continued to operate. The agency has always vehemently denied any link to either the doctor, Shakeel Afridi, or the CIA.
Mr Khan said on Friday that the charity had been working in Pakistan “year after year against their own charter and agenda”.
“We will not let anyone work under the table,” he said.
Police, meanwhile, said that Save the Children was involved in “anti-Pakistani projects”.
“We have been monitoring their calls and watching their offices,” a senior police official said. “Their activities are very suspicious.”
An official at the charity said several staff had been denied visas since 2012, and that Pakistani authorities had blocked supplies.
“These restrictions have blocked aid to millions of children and their families,” the official said.
Last year, Save the Children’s programmes in health, education and food security in Pakistan reached more than 4 million children and their families, the charity said.
“All our work is designed and delivered in close collaboration with the government ministries across the country, and aims to strengthen public service delivery systems in health, nutrition, education and child welfare,” it said.
A draft bill, the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act 2015, would make it easier for officials to prevent groups that receive foreign funds from operating in Pakistan.
Islamabad deregistered 3,000 local aid groups in December last year, according to Civicus, a global alliance of civil society organisations.
Aid groups have complained in recent years that increasing government restrictions on their activities has hampered their efforts to help vulnerable people in a country which still has huge numbers of people living in poverty.
They say their work in so-called “sensitive” areas such as southwestern Baluchistan – the country’s poorest, least developed province – have been particularly affected.
Without naming any organisations, Mr Khan said on Friday that some NGOs had been operating without proper regulation and had worked in Baluchistan when they only had permission to work in Islamabad.
The interior minister also said that charities doing “positive” work should not worry but criticised activists working for the abolition of the death penalty and judicial reform.
“We know which local NGOs are involved in this slander campaign,” he said. “This propaganda should stop. There should be respect for our judicial system.”
* Agencies