KABUL (TOLOnews): The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said Pakistan’s plans to repatriate Afghan refugees can lead to serious violation of human rights.
According to UNHCR, thousands of Afghan refugees, 60% of them children, have been forcefully deported from Pakistan.
“The refugees’ expulsion from Pakistan is quite complicated and systematic, it sometimes gets severe and sometimes slow. It is right that camps have been made and refugees are taken into them,” said Mir Ahmad Rauf, head of the Afghan refugees union in Pakistan.
Earlier, deputy Minister of Economy, Abdul Latif Nazari, told Tolonews that, “they [refugees] are economic and educational assets for our country, we have a plan for them to absorb them in government and private sector to live a better life.”
Meanwhile, the Islamic Emirate’s General Consul in Karachi said that the tracking and identification of documented Afghan refugees have been facilitated. Following the negotiations with Pakistani authorities, documented refugees are no longer taken to camps, said Abdul Jabar Takhari.
“They would arrest documented refugees and take them into the centers where undocumented ones are being kept. Now the refugees are tracked and identified in their neighborhoods,” said Abdul Jabar Takhari, the General Consul of the Islamic Emirate in Karachi.
Afghan refugees who have recently returned to the country complain about the ill treatment of Pakistan’s authorities.
“They [Pakistani police] would come to camps and would harass us and would extort us,” said Daud, a Pakistan-based Afghan refugee.
The Afghan refugees’ expulsion from Pakistan has accelerated as civil and refugees activists in Pakistan continue to call on the country’s caretaker government to stop the repatriation.
The UN Under-Secretary-General, Martin Griffiths said he has allocated $10 million to support Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan.
Refugees’ expulsion serious HR violation
