RASC News Agency: In a rare and unified appeal, more than 113 civil society organizations, advocacy groups, and protest movements across Pakistan have jointly called upon the international community to intervene urgently and prevent the forced deportation of Afghanistani refugees, warning that such actions risk returning thousands of vulnerable families into the clutches of Taliban persecution.
In their collective statement, the signatories declared:
“We, a coalition of vulnerable Afghanistani refugees living in Pakistan, along with allied civic organizations and rights movements, express our profound alarm over the escalating threats of forced repatriation. The prospect of being sent back under Taliban rule fills us with deep fear and despair. This is not migration it is exile born of tyranny.”
Since the collapse of the Afghanistani Republic in August 2021 and the Taliban’s violent seizure of power, hundreds of thousands of citizens particularly women, journalists, human rights defenders, civil society activists, and former military personnel have fled their homeland to escape political persecution, gender apartheid, and systemic violence. For many, Pakistan became the first and only refuge.
Although thousands of these refugees lack formal legal documentation, the statement stresses that a significant number are registered or recognized by the UNHCR and are residing in designated shelters or monitored safe houses. Despite this, Pakistani authorities have intensified arrests and deportations in recent months actions that rights advocates describe as both legally indefensible and morally inhumane.
The statement warns that such deportations constitute a blatant violation of the international principle of non-refoulement a core tenet of international refugee law that forbids returning individuals to territories where they may face persecution, torture, or inhumane treatment.
“Forcing refugees back to a land ruled by a regime that denies women education, silences journalists, and imprisons dissent is a betrayal of humanity itself,” the statement reads. “International silence is complicity.”
The signatories urged global institutions, including the UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Union, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to engage directly with Pakistan’s leadership to halt deportations and to establish clear humanitarian corridors for vulnerable refugees.
They further appealed for accelerated third-country resettlement programs, particularly for women activists, educators, and journalists who face imminent threats of reprisal if returned to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The groups also demanded robust international monitoring mechanisms to prevent refugee rights from becoming a bargaining chip in regional power politics.
Beyond the legal dimensions, this collective call reflects the deepening human tragedy of a displaced nation stripped of its future. The plight of Afghanistani refugees is not the consequence of migration by choice, but of state collapse under a regime that replaced pluralism with repression, and governance with coercion.
Human rights experts argue that while Islamabad cites national security concerns to justify deportations, such policies effectively criminalize survival. They risk transforming Pakistan’s refugee population already vulnerable to economic exploitation and police harassment into victims of a geopolitical tug-of-war between competing interests, while the Taliban regime benefits from regional silence.
Analysts warn that returning refugees to Afghanistan would be tantamount to sending them into the hands of their oppressors. The Taliban’s record of public floggings, arbitrary detentions, and gender-based apartheid has created an environment where no guarantee of safety exists for returnees. The forced repatriation of Afghanistani refugees would therefore not only violate international law but condemn thousands to renewed persecution and potential death.
As the statement concludes powerfully:
“The world bears both a moral and legal duty to act. Indifference in the face of forced deportations is participation in the crime. To send refugees back under Taliban rule is to return them to a prison without walls a place where freedom, identity, and humanity itself are extinguished.”
The appeal by Pakistan’s civil society is not merely a humanitarian plea but a moral indictment of the global community’s inaction. The refugees of Afghanistan are not statistics, but survivors of a state hijacked by ideological extremism. Their fate now hangs between borders one that expels them, and another that has already erased their rights.
