New York, June 24 -- Amnesty International has strongly condemned the life imprisonment sentences handed down to prominent Baloch activists Dr Mahrang Baloch and Sibghat Ullah Shah Jee, describing the verdict as a violation of fair trial standards and evidence of Pakistan's alleged misuse of anti-terrorism laws to suppress peaceful dissent.

In a press release, Amnesty International's Acting Regional Director for South Asia, Isabelle Lassee, stated that the convictions represented "an affront to the right to a fair trial" and accused authorities of cynically employing anti-terrorism legislation against human rights defenders.

The criticism follows a ruling by an anti-terrorism court in Quetta that sentenced Mahrang Baloch and Sibghat Ull...