Greater than 800,000 Afghans are prone to be expelled within the second section of the controversial plan.
Pakistan is ready to begin the second section of a controversial plan to ship undocumented Afghan refugees again to their nation.
Starting Sunday, authorities are prone to expel greater than 800,000 Afghans from the nation, after about 541,000 had been pressured to depart within the first phase in November final yr.
If they don’t depart voluntarily, the refugees face arrest and deportation.
Earlier than the primary section of repatriation, the Pakistani authorities claimed there have been practically 4.4 million Afghan refugees, out of which an estimated 1.73 million had been undocumented.
The federal government has defended the crackdown, citing safety issues and a struggling financial system.
The deportation order got here amid a dramatic enhance in armed attacks throughout Pakistan, with the federal government attributing the assaults to teams and nationals primarily based in Afghanistan, an allegation the Taliban authorities in Afghanistan rejected.
Philippa Candler, the consultant of the United Nations Excessive Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Islamabad, instructed Al Jazeera that Pakistan ought to have a look at the profiles of the undocumented Afghans earlier than expelling them, as a lot of them had been “in want of worldwide safety”.
“They’re refugees. They’re not concerned in terrorist actions. They’re simply individuals who fled and who want safety,” stated Candler, including that if any Afghan nationals had been concerned in terrorist actions, “it needs to be handled individually”.
Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from the Khazana refugee camp in Peshawar metropolis that hosts about 1,300 Afghan households, stated the refugees have pleaded with the worldwide group and the Pakistani authorities to provide them extra time “in order that they may depart in a dignified method”.
“They complain that their homes are being raided within the lifeless of the night time. They’ve been pressured to depart this nation in a really depressing situation,” Hyder stated, including that it was “very troublesome to depart after spending a lifetime in a rustic after which being pressured out”.
Pakistan is just not a signatory to the 1951 UN conference that protects the rights of the refugees. The nation additionally lacks home legal guidelines to guard the refugees in addition to procedures to find out the standing of people searching for worldwide safety inside its borders.
Rights group Amnesty Worldwide has warned of the chance of persecution for the refugees returning to Afghanistan.