The EU says Pakistan's GSP+ trade access is not guaranteed past 2028, after a July 2026 compliance report found legislative progress but little enforcement on rights and rule of law.
On 16 July 2026, the European Commission and the EU's foreign policy service published a joint assessment of Pakistan's compliance with GSP+, covering the 2023-25 monitoring period. It found that Pakistan had regressed in a number of areas and made only limited positive change on the 27 international conventions tied to the scheme. The report flagged concerns on enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, restrictions on freedom of expression, treatment of journalists and minorities, judicial independence, access to justice, and forced labour.
EU Ambassador to Pakistan Raimundas Karoblis told Dawn, in a report published 9 September, that the European Commission holds serious concerns about compliance with the conventions underpinning GSP+. "The situation is not certain," he said. "And, of course, GSP+ preferences cannot be taken for granted."
Pakistan has held GSP+ status since 2014. The EU now takes in close to 28 percent of Pakistan's exports, concentrated heavily in textiles and clothing. In 2024, exports worth 7.115 billion euros used GSP+ preferences, saving exporters an estimated 732 million euros in tariffs, according to Dawn's reporting on the Commission's own figures. Exports to the EU grew 92 percent between 2014 and FY2024-25, reaching close to 9 billion dollars, a trend the government has pointed to repeatedly as evidence the scheme delivers. None of that growth carries forward automatically.
The current framework expires at the end of 2026. Its replacement, Regulation (EU) 2026/1395, runs the scheme from 2027 to 2036 and gives existing beneficiaries a transition period to 31 December 2028. That transition is not a renewal. To keep preferential access afterward, Pakistan has to formally reapply, with binding undertakings and a submitted priority plan of action, against a conventions list that grows from 27 to 32. Business Recorder put the shift plainly: from 2027, Islamabad is judged less on what it has legislated than on what it can show working on the ground.
That is the gap the July assessment keeps returning to. Across review cycles Pakistan has generally passed the legislation the EU asks for, on enforced disappearances, on labour protections, on related statutes. The Commission's complaint is not about missing law. It is about enforcement, and the same categories, extrajudicial killings, restrictions on journalists, weak access to justice, recur in successive biennial reports rather than closing out. A government case built around citing new statutes, instead of convictions, inspections, or closed cases, will not satisfy a framework redesigned specifically to weigh implementation over legislation.
Two years is a narrow window for reform measured in enforcement outcomes rather than bills passed, particularly across conventions spanning courts, police conduct, and labour inspection regimes that sit outside any single ministry's direct control. The textile and clothing workforce most exposed to a preference loss has no bearing on whether Pakistan can show the Commission's monitoring mission real movement on disappearances or journalist safety before the 2027 reapplication window. Treated as a trade negotiation, this ends where the last several review cycles have ended. Treated as the governance problem the report actually describes, the trade outcome follows from fixing that problem, not from arguing around it.
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