IN a damning report on “forced repatriation” of Afghan refugees, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls on the government to avoid recreating conditions in 2017 that coerced involuntary return of refugees to Afghanistan last year.

In the report titled “Pakistan Coercion, UN Complicity: The Mass Forced Return of Afghan Refugees”, the HRW asks the government to end police abuse, revert to its earlier policy of extending Proof of Registration cards by at least two years, avoid creating anxiety about deportation of Afghans and allow undocumented Afghan refugees seeking protection to request and obtain it in Pakistan.

The HRW conducted 115 interviews with refugee returnees in Afghanistan and refugees and undocumented Afghans in Pakistan. The primary research was supplemented by UN reports presenting the reasons thousands of Afghans gave for returning to Afghanistan. The findings suggest that Pakistani pressure on Afghan refugees left many of them with no choice but to leave Pakistan in 2016.

The HRW also holds the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) complicit in the “coerced return” of Afghan refugees, and calls on it to “speak out as necessary and challenge any repeat in 2017 of the appalling and unlawful pressure Pakistan placed on Afghans in 2016, that coerced many to return to danger and destitution in Afghanistan in such massive numbers”.

According to the report, Pakistan has hosted over a million Afghan refugees for most of the last 40 years. In the second half of 2016, 365,000 of the 1.5 million registered refugees were “pushed out by a toxic combination of deportation threats and police abuses”. About 200,000 of the 1m undocumented Afghan refugees in Pakistan returned to their country over the same period. The HRW terms the exodus “the world’s largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent times”.

Although Pakistan is bound by the universally-binding customary law of refoulement preventing the return of people to a place where they would face risk of persecution, torture, ill treatment or threat to life, Pakistani authorities have made it clear in public statements that they would like to see similar numbers of refugees return to Afghanistan in 2017, the report says. The statements come at a time when the Afghan conflict has killed and wounded more civilians than at any other time since 2009, displaced at least 1.5m people and left a third of the population destitute.

UNHCR spokesperson Duniya Aslam Khan, quoted by the HRW, has said the UN agency does not promote return to Afghanistan given the enduring conflict and the country’s limited absorption capacity to cope with returning refugees.

The ‘voluntary’ return of Afghan refugees was ramped up in the wake of the Army Public School attack in Dec 2014, the HRW report says. The National Action Plan (NAP) to counter terrorism includes a policy to repatriate Afghans from Pakistan despite the fact that the government’s own investigations did not find “any significant Afghan involvement in acts of terrorism”, and the states and frontier regions minister had stated there was no evidence that registered Afghan refugees had ever been involved in “terrorism-related” activities in Pakistan, the HRW says.

NAP also included a pledge to register all undocumented Afghans in the country in July-August 2015, which never happened, according to the report.

The consequences of NAP for Afghan refugees included a wave of police abuse, such as the unlawful use of force, arbitrary arrests and detentions, extortion and demolition of houses.

However, Afghans interviewed by the HRW said that police abuses had decreased significantly during the last few months of 2015.

In addition to “several deadly security incidents”, deteriorating relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan sparked hostility to the Afghan people in Pakistan. Trade deals signed between Afghanistan, Iran and India in May 2016, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s joint inauguration of the ‘Friendship Dam’ in Kabul in June 2016 and the killing of an Afghan soldier and a Pakistani major the same month at the Torkham border are cited by the HRW as political developments that hurt the Afghan people living in Pakistan.

The report includes quotes from interviews detailing police abuses, arbitrary detentions and discrimination faced by refugees on a daily basis.

According to the report, under pressure from Pakistani authorities, the UNHCR increased the cash grant given to returning Afghan refugees to $400 from $200 in June 2016 in an attempt to incentivise Afghan refugees to return to their country.

The UNHCR spokesperson denied the allegation, saying “not a single returnee — out of more than 4,500 interviewed upon arrival — has cited the cash grant as a primary factor in their decision to return”.

This claim, however, is countered by the HRW which says “for many returning refugees, the UNHCR cash grant increase was a critical factor in persuading them to escape Pakistan’s abuses”.

Ms Khan also denied that Pakistani authorities pressured the UNHCR to take steps to help increase the rate of Afghan refugee returns. “The UNHCR decided to increase the cash grant to support immediate humanitarian needs of returning refugees. Refugees spent the money on transport, food and shelter.”

Published in Dawn February 13th, 2017