ISLAMABAD, Dec 23: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been working with parliamentarians to formulate laws for protection of refugees in the legal system of the country, UN officials told Dawn .

Replying to a question, a UNHCR spokesperson, Jack Redden, told Dawn that domestic laws of Pakistan did not contain any provision pertaining to refugee protection. He said though Pakistan hosted millions of refugees, it was still not a party to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees.

According to an official, the UNHCR had worked with the Parliamentary Commission for Human Rights to draft amendments to the domestic laws for the last one year. Sources said the recommended amendments, if passed by the legislature, would for the first time incorporate a definition of refugees in Pakistani law and exempt asylum seekers from the punitive provisions of the Foreigners Act.

The proposed legislation and amendments to domestic laws are aimed to provide protection to refugees against arbitrary arrest and harassment by the law-enforcement agencies.

According to sources, without any constitutional provision defining the status of refugees, the refugees were legally viewed as illegal immigrants. Background interviews showed that some parliamentarians had reservations on the proposed legislation on asylum, fearing it could open floodgates of political asylum seekers from Afghanistan to burden the already constrained support infrastructure of the country.

According to official figures of the UNHCR and the government, some 3.2 million Afghan refugees were still living in the country, almost a million of them in the refugee camps.