TIL Desk/World/Islamabad-Hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees were forced to leave Pakistan last year due to the country’s high-handed policies and harassment, a leading rights group said. Terming it as the world’s largest unlawful forced exodus of refugees in recent times. In a damning report, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) asked Pakistan government to end police abuse and other measures against refugees.
In the report titled “Pakistan Coercion, UN Complicity: The Mass Forced Return of Afghan Refugees”, the HRW called on the government to avoid recreating conditions in 2017 that coerced the involuntary return of refugees to Afghanistan last year. The HRW conducted 115 interviews with refugee returnees in Afghanistan and refugees and undocumented Afghans in Pakistan. The findings suggested that Pakistani pressure on Afghan refugees left many of them with no choice but to leave Pakistan last year.
The rights group 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.”
