Pakistan Pakistan charging refugees $830 to leave

[Saiyan0321]

Pakistan charging refugees $830 to leave​

Pakistan has confirmed that it is charging an $830 fee to undocumented refugees who want to leave the country.
The exit fee applies to people who arrived without a visa.
In October Pakistan announced that it would deport 1.7 million undocumented foreigners from the country if they did not leave by 1 November.
Most are Afghans, including hundreds of thousands of people who fled Afghanistan when the Taliban retook power in 2021.
Those who have expired visas will be charged depending on how long they have overstayed.
An exit fee does not apply to anyone travelling back to Afghanistan.

Many Afghans who arrived in Pakistan when Kabul fell to the Taliban have faced delays getting documentation, according to groups like Amnesty International.
Pakistan is not a party to the Refugee Convention and has said it does not recognise any of the Afghans living in its borders as refugees.
A senior diplomat in Pakistan told the BBC that the fee was particularly worrying when it was being applied to people who were being relocated on humanitarian grounds.
"In many countries, if you overstay your visa you have to pay or you get booted out," they said.
"The problem is charging those we are taking on humanitarian visas. Not necessarily the people we are taking because they worked for us, but who UNHCR sees as having a humanitarian need. It sets a very bad precedent."
The diplomat said that there had been some early indication that the government could be reviewing the policy, which they said they're encouraging.

The Pakistan authorities did not discuss the possibility of a review with the BBC.
The UNHCR told the BBC it is trying to "resolve the issue".
"We are advocating for the authorities to exempt refugees from these requirements.
"The Government and people of Pakistan have a commendable, decades-long history of providing asylum and protection to Afghan refugees, this needs to continue."
A spokesperson for the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said "Pakistani laws, like the immigration laws in other countries including the United Kingdom, have fines and punishments for individuals who overstay their visas or are in violation of immigration laws.
"Any fines that Pakistan has imposed or will impose are in conformity with our laws."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67512576


For the last couple of months, Pakistan has undertaken a drastic and shocking crackdown on Afghan Refugees, many of whom have been living in Pakistan since the USSR invasion of Afghanistan. Many of these individuals do not have proper documentation and couple of months ago, in the wake of terror attacks and the new nationalization policy of the TTP terror group, Pakistan announced an immediate and absolute eviction of all undocumented Afghan individuals. This move was neither discussed in parliament nor through stakeholders but by the caretaker government. I wrote a bit about this which i will reproduce so that i wont be repeating some of what i had already stated

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A few days ago, the Federal Caretaker Cabinet held a meeting regarding the growing threat of terrorism and militancy within Pakistan. The said cabinet, absent any thought of whether they have the authority to formulate new security policies or not, or whether the impact of devising such policies could be devastating for the state, decided to shift all the blame for deteriorating security on Afghan refugees, which came as no surprise. The caretaker cabinet also announced that 1.1 million Afghan refugees without documentation have till November before they will be forcefully evicted from Pakistan. This news was met with massive outrage as international and local humanitarian organizations called such a move myopic and an illogical take on the worsening security situation.

Before we discuss the legality of the forceful eviction of Afghan refugees, we must first discuss under whose authority is a caretaker government empowered to make such a policy decision. It is now a settled principle of law that a caretaker government cannot make policy decisions, especially those that can have long-term effects on the country, as well as the incoming government. The Supreme Court has clearly laid down this principle in 2021 PLD 313 and the same principle was cemented by the Peshawar High Court and the Lahore High Court in 2022 PLD 100 and 2023 CLC 1535 respectively, wherein the courts stated that the caretaker government can only continue day-to-day policies till the elected government comes to power.

Even if we take into account the recent amendments to the Election Act 2017, they still do not allow the caretaker government to make such serious policy decisions, as the amendments only allowed for the implementation of the IMF program. There is no doubt that the caretaker cabinet does not have the power to make such a policy decision, especially when the mess brought forth by such a policy will have to be cleaned up by the incoming government. In addition to the burden such a precedent may create on incoming governments, an unelected institution cannot be allowed to make such policy or reform, as they are not the representatives of the people.


Furthermore, Pakistan cannot forcefully evict Afghan refugees, especially if those refugees face threats in their home country, as it is against International Humanitarian Law. Whilst Pakistan is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol, that does not mean that Pakistan can take any inhumane action that it sees fit regarding refugees. The principle of non-refoulment is now considered a legal customary principle in International Law. The International Court of Justice in the judgment Nicaragua vs United States of America, held that the conduct of states following such rules is sufficient for the existence of customary law and any instance of the contrary should be treated as a breach rather than the formation of a new rule.

Considering the fact that the principle of non-refoulment, or returning an asylum seeker to their home country has been declared as an act contrary to International Humanitarian Law in multiple treaties as well as the United Nations Declaration of 1967, it can be fairly stated that the rights of the refugees are no longer enshrined solely in aforementioned convention and protocol. Further evidence of this customary law can be perused from the fact that in addition to the 1967 Declaration, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 37/95 in 1982 regarding principles of asylum and non-refoulment and then in 1989, Resolution 44/137, which called upon all states to refrain from taking steps that would jeopardize the institution of asylum which was further cemented in Resolution 45/140 of 14 December 1990, Resolution 46/106 of 16 December 1991 and in Resolution 47/105 of 16 December 1992. In Resolution 48/116 of 21 December 1993, the General Assembly called upon "all States to uphold asylum as an indispensable instrument for the international protection of refugees, and to respect scrupulously the fundamental principle of non-refoulement."

It is clear that Pakistan cannot act as if International Refugee Law is not applicable and thus Pakistan cannot announce an arbitrary refoulment policy. Not only do such announcements diminish the international standing of Pakistan as a leading refugee host nation, but they also create fear and insecurity among the refugee population, leading to human rights abuses. Barely a week has passed since this announcement and already news is coming in that Afghan refugees are being hunted down by the police with many paying them protection money to escape molestation. Others are being asked to shut down businesses with many among them complaining that individuals are looking to purchase their material stock and establishments at throwaway prices. There is fear among them and it is reminiscent of the subsequent forceful eviction in 2017, which saw many Afghan refugees’ properties being looted and houses simply taken over because they were being repatriated. Families were broken apart back then, and it is looking quite clear that this drive will be no different.

The 2017 repatriation drive ended when too many abuses were being reported and the government came under severe pressure to formulate a proper procedure. It is true that Pakistan has played generous host to Afghan refugees for decades and since the taking over of Afghanistan by the Taliban, Pakistan has come to host an additional 600,000 refugees, yet it is due to these complications that Pakistan cannot arbitrarily announce a free-for-all a month from now. It must formulate a proper procedure for repatriation. The first thing it must do is not have an unelected caretaker government announce such a serious policy in such a discretionary manner. Only the elected government has the power and democratic authority to make such a policy. When the elected government comes to power, it must immediately pass refugee legislation, which despite decades of hosting refugees, is absent in Pakistan. This legislation must contain detailed procedures regarding documentation and repatriation of refugees and this repatriation must be done through a proper state institution rather than leaving innocent families to the mercy of the corrupt local law enforcement agencies and wolves that come with them.

Refugees must be protected and repatriated with dignity and as for those who have spent decades here, have families here and have played an important role in the growth of the country, the legislative assembly must come together to determine once and for all their legal status so that this ball that has been kicked around since 1977 can finally be answered and that decision by the parliament must be respected by the judicature and the executive, neither of whom have the authority to determine who can and cannot be citizen or refugee in Pakistan.

There is no doubt that rising militancy has created an atmosphere of fear in Pakistan, and it is very easy to blame illegal immigrants and refugees for our security failures, but the government of Pakistan must remember that it has repeatedly stood for refugees all over the country and has been a shining example of how nations must bear responsibility for an individual that has nowhere else to go. Pakistan, through its actions, has played a leading role in transforming the rights of refugees regarding refoulment into customary international law. If Pakistan undertakes an inhumane and devastating refoulment policy, then it will tarnish all that goodwill, and at a time when Pakistan’s international outreach has been severely limited, adding refugee abuse to the growing list of human rights abuses in the country will have a devastating effect on its international standing.

https://thefridaytimes.com/11-Oct-2023/the-afghan-refoulment-principle
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Now as i mentioned that Pakistan cannot indulge in such forced repatriation especially if such a decision comes from a caretaker government which has no legal standing to take such a step and this is doubled when we place this step under the microscope of international law.

Going further, what i feared was that it would lead to Human Right Abuses and that is what happened. The Afghan refugees are facing severe harassment as they are forced to sell their property at low rates, if they have given economic loans, a business often afghans found themselves in, then they are not going to get them back and any property that they built, business that they ran are currently being ransacked. Now how it worked was that when the Afghan war began in the 80s and 90s many afghans moved to Pakistan however pakistani documentation process was neither streamlined nor accessible. Those that didnt have documentation nor the political linkage to get documentation relied on middle men aka individuals in whose name they conducted business or bought property and the local affiliation would play the security role in this relationship. This was then used to build the economic conditions of cities. Did they pay taxes? They paid indirect taxes like the rest of Pakistan however business and property built was taxed and would file returns when the tax crackdown began post 2016 which was largely unsuccessful. These individuals knew nothing of Afghanistan and remained in Pakistan. Their children were born in Pakistan. Some of them, post the 2017 crackdown against refugees, paid off the police to remain in Pakistan.

All in all, it was clear that Pakistan needed a better policy rather than locking them in trucks and sending them to the border. Pakistan needed to initiate a documentation crackdown asking all undocumented individuals to get refugee documents so that they could be brought into the sphere and should have made the process as easy as it could get. The thing is that these shocking abuses will cause generational hatred between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Afghan refugees were the sole group of afghanistan that had a positive image of Pakistan and i dont mean the refugees that are living in US but those in Pakistan working odd jobs and helping the community and the economy. By partaking in what is clearly an act against the principles of International Law, which is surprising as Pakistan often argues for supremacy of International Law but also against the principles of Islam, which is again surprising considering the fact that Pakistan is an Islamic State.

If the end result of our Afghan policy was after 40 years of brutal interference, for Afghan natives as well as refugees to both hate us, then we need to hold our policy thinkers accountable. With Afghanistan, there was already hatred and our actions have made sure to quadruple those feelings, with Iran, due to shia oppression and our inability to balance the Gulf divide, we have a neighbor that not only deeply distrusts us but is repeatedly offended by our constant shia targeting especially when it comes to blasphemy laws. Then we have our eastern neighbour who at this point feels that it no longer needs to even sit at the same table and the only time we can get its attention is when either it needs to create a bogeyman for domestic politics or when we poke it in the UN. Our neighbours across the Arabian Sea have been very cold to us since the Yemen War since we offered them our mercenary services only to get petro-dollars and when they asked their mercenary to send in the army, we refused and they realized what good is a mercenary that isnt interested in fighting their war for them so now they treat us with unprecedented coldness.
Pakistani people need to hold the establishment accountable for this blunder after all, i have great trouble in believing that we have played no role in the disaster situation that our foreign relations find themselves in. It is clear that many of these policies were made on the whims of individuals rather than a continuous growth of a single policy and now those policies have become untenable. Let us also not forget that our relationship with the turks have also cooled dramatically as our backpaddling with the Turk-Malaysia bloc showed that we cant be reliable and the people-people interaction is best left unsaid.

At this point, it is quite certain that this forced repatriation was not a desirable policy and if the issue is security related then the role of Afghan refugees, in comparison to locals, when it comes to terror networking has been minimal and if we are punishing millions for the act of a select then how is this not collective punishment? Collective punishment comes in all shapes and sizes and what Pakistan is doing is no different. If the objective is the penalize the Taliban government for their inability to secure TTP activities on their territory thus send in waves of refugee population to penalize the government, then that is even more short sighted.

But nothing and i mean nothing is more cheap than robbing destitute afghans for a few dollars in the hope that the UNHCR will provide the country with some inflows. We were financially and politically bankrupt, we are now morally bankrupt and when you are loading individuals in trucks, robbing their property and basically holding them hostage so that either they or somebody else will pay for their freedom then you are nothing more than a bandit and you need guts to give moral lectures to the world.

 

[Marlii]

Lets see how many of these guys are gonna get back to Afghanistan and turn all this grievences into pain for Pakistanis by joining TTP or ISKP.

 

[Saiyan0321]

That is a further concern because most of these individuals have nowhere to go in Afghanistan and are mostly finding themselves in tents and the Afghan government has no resources nor international aid programs that can provide these individuals with homes or jobs. In many researches that i have read, poverty has always been one of the reasons, if not the driving reasons behind joining groups that either indulge in organized crimes or in terrorism. They may either join the service of the taliban or the local warlord who run their own economy or they may grow terror groups who currently need manpower to rebuild their network such as TTP and ISKP. Infact in the last year, TTP has drastically changed their message which was previously focused on creating a proper islamic riyasat by fighting an islamic struggle against individuals who they deemed to be helping the "crusaders" aka the Pakistan army, government and police. Reckless suicide bombings were justified on these basis and civilian casualties were either justified as collateral or disparaged as individuals who are not fighting for islam are individually just as bad..Recently they have changed their message and have focused more on Pashtun Nationalism which has not only allowed them the space to survive among the neighboring areas of the Durand Line of Afghanistan but have also allowed them to retain their identity and functionality. Now these organizations will look into these individuals as potential recruits and they will and can build a solid militant network.

Pakistan has repeatedly insisted that the Taliban need to tackle this growing phenomena that has found support among the local tribes and warlords of Afghan border regions but the demand is largely lip service. This taliban is different from the Taliban of the 90s and while the 1996 Taliban movement was also composed of alliances and compromises, there was a strong central structure that allowed to police and enforce their will on many regions. This luxury is absent in the Taliban of the 2020s which was able to operate at a grander scale thanks to alliances and compromises with local tribal leaders and warlords. The Afghan government was also reliant on these alliances which limited their ability to not only take action against the TTP but also against the Taliban. The Taliban followed a similar setup and when the fall of Afghanistan started happening, the Taliban actively pursued alliances and diplomatic policies to change the game and within a matter of weeks, Afghanistan fell apart... Now we have this Taliban in the center which is functioning on these alliances and one of the major aspects of these alliances is non-interference which is why after fall of kabul, Taliban has neither been able to crackdown on TTP groups nor have they been able to play significant role on border skirmishes. The newspapers say that its Taliban vs Pakistan but in reality its the local warlord taking action or providing cover to infiltration. The taliban are only able to sit at the table and negotiate and many a times, it happened that you had the FC commander, the taliban leader and the tribal leader all discussing the aftermath of the events. Now the taliban can only maintain control if these alliances remain so they cannot send in large contingent of troops to a local warlord region which will only complicate the situation for Afghanistan especially if said war is in behest of a foreign nation against their own citizens.

In such a situation there is a danger of militant organizations expanding their manpower and network capabilities to become even more stronger thus beyond the capability of the taliban to control or even contain and this can become even bigger nightmare if TTP utilizes these potential recruits to further their influence on warlords of the regions and chieftains of the tribal belts. Their abrupt change of narrative is evidence of their changing strategy to account for local political view in west of the durand line and if true, then we may face an enemy that will be beyond central control and might be able to unite the disorganized tribes west of the line to fight the Pakistani Army and while there is no fear of sweeping conquests, these organizations can become a nightmare for security of the regions east of the durand line and the security of the line itself, a constant bleed impacting not only the area but the economy as well since Pakistan will be forced to further enhance its COIN capabilities and Border security and if these organizations become more deadly then the border security will have to be enhanced with more weaponry and training which will again be a drain on economy as well as a drain on our military capabilities to secure the eastern front since the flow of funds going west could have been utilized for the east and perhaps the most strategic failure which needs to be discussed if that for the last 60+ years since the Bajaur war of 1960, Pakistan has feared the division of its security forces and concerns on two ends East and West of the Pakistani border and Pakistan has taken every step to ensure a result where it does not end in such a scenario and by 1997 it was considered a success since Pakistan had barely anybody worthwhile manning the border yet by 2023 we are not only building large fences but checkpoints, checkposts, forts, patrol paths and raising multiple FC Corps leading the the result that is the exact fear that was in 1960 and was considered the worst case scenario.....

Rather than sweeping this under the rug, Pakistani think tank needs to evaluate and research as to why our Afghan Foreign Policy led to the worst case scenario and what should be done to mitigate this failure to ease the future? You dont interfere in a foreign country, repeatedly partake in the removal of their representatives, radicalize not just said country but also your own people and morph the fabric of their and your society only to bring forth the same result that you were desperately trying to avoid? The inability of our policy thinkers to think 5 years or 10 years or 20 years or 40 years ahead has resulted in great damages to the country and there is no doubt that the repeated military and establishment interference has played a significant role in this especially the lack of responsibility and accountability exhibited not only by the establishment but by the military as well since their repeated efforts to interfere, come to the front, go in the back, interfere from the shadows has allowed Pakistan to be a rudderless ship for 70 years in situations which needed a united and clear head. If one analyzes the political and especially the military history of Pakistan, one gets the image of a headless chicken running everywhere absent any goal or objective, resting solely on the tactical laurels of the individual talented few who found their brilliance being overshadowed by a rudderless and reckless central establishment.