Rights group blasts UN, Pakistan over Afghan refugees

By Shadi Khan Saif

KABUL, Afghanistan (AA) - A new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report grills both the government of Pakistan and the United Nations for threatening and driving out hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees back to their restive country.

The 76-page report, “Pakistan Coercion, UN Complicity: The Mass Forced Return of Afghan Refugees,” released Monday, is based on interviews with repatriated and current refugees, Afghan and Pakistani officials, and representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in both countries.

It said since July 2016, up to 600,000 Afghan refugees have been “driven out” from Pakistan.

Gerry Simpson, the group’s senior refugee researcher and the report’s author, blamed both Pakistan and the UNHCR for promoting the exodus.

“Pakistan is bound by the universally binding customary law rule of refoulement to not return anyone to a place where they would face a real risk of persecution, torture or other ill-treatment, or a threat to life. This includes an obligation not to pressure individuals, including registered refugees, into returning to places where they face a serious risk of such harm”, says the report.

A number of returning refugees told HRW that unprecedented persecution over the past two years in Pakistan forced them to unwillingly return to Afghanistan, especially after a number of terrorist attacks, particularly the 2014 Army Public School (APS) attack in Peshawar, blamed on Afghan-based militants.

The human rights watchdog report also criticized the UNHCR’s “incentive” of doubling the compensation amount to $400 for each returning refugee.

“The UN refugee agency should end the fiction that the mass forced return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan is, in fact, mass voluntary return. If the UNHCR feels that giving cash to returning refugees is the best way to help them survive in Afghanistan, it should at the very least make clear it does not consider their return to be voluntary”, said Simpson.

The group urged donor agencies and the international community to ensure Pakistan extends Afghan refugees’ proof of registration cards until the end of March 2019 and reopens registration for the cards or other protected status so that Afghans who arrived after February 2007 can seek and obtain protected status in Pakistan.

The reported stressed that Pakistan’s forced return of Afghans comes at a particularly dangerous time, with the conflict in Afghanistan killing and injuring more civilians than at any other time since 2009, displacing at least 1.5 million people, and with a third of the population destitute.