LAHORE (Web Desk) – The Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a statement issued on Sunday, spoke out against the forceful return of Afghan refugees from the country, and reminded the Pakistan government of its obligation to protect all the Afghans in the country, including those who are not registered as refugees.
It said the recent increase in the repatriation of refugees seem to indicate that they had been coerced into leaving by the local authorities.
“Pakistani officials should not be scapegoating Afghans because of the Taliban’s atrocities in Peshawar,” said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “It is inhumane, not to mention unlawful, to return Afghans to places they may face harm and not protect them from harassment and abuse.”
According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), nine times as many Afghan refugees repatriated from Pakistan in January 2015 after the attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, than in December 2014.
Nearly all of the refugees returned from three Pakistani provinces – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Kashmir, and Punjab – where an increase in arrests, detentions, and evictions of Afghans were reported during the same period.
The overwhelming majority of Afghans who have left Pakistan since December 16, 2014, have not been formally deported, but are rather categorized as “spontaneous returns”.
An International Organization for Migration official told Human Rights Watch that many of the unregistered Afghan returnees reported that they had left Pakistan to escape harassment following the Peshawar attack.
“Pakistan’s government is tarnishing the country’s well-deserved reputation for hospitality toward refugees by tolerating the punitive and potentially unlawful coercive repatriation of Afghan refugees,” Kine said.
“The government needs to defend the rights of its Afghan population and ensure that local authorities aren’t carrying out vindictive reprisals for an atrocity the Afghan refugees bear no responsibility for.”
