In September 2023 the Pakistan government announced the forcible repatriation of unregistered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, with those who failed to return by 1 November liable to be detained and forcibly deported.

It left thousands of Afghan Christians potentially being forced to live in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, despite the Afghan criminal code which existed even before the Taliban came to power, decreeing that anyone deemed to have converted from Islam faces execution for “apostasy”.

Afghan Christians

One of the most extraordinary stories of the second half of the twentieth century has been the growth of the Afghan church, which emerged from a very small number of Afghan Christians prior to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. That invasion in 1979 led to huge numbers of Afghan refugees  fleeing to Pakistan in what became the world’s largest refugee crisis. It was there in the refugee camps in Pakistan, that the number of Afghan Christians quietly began to grow dramatically, despite the camps being controlled by mujahaddin groups engaged in jihad against the Russians.

After 9/11 the ousting of the Taliban led some, though by no means all, Afghan Christian refugees to begin returning. The Afghan church now began to grow significantly in Afghanistan itself so that by 2021 relatively conservative estimates were suggesting around 10,000 Afghan Christians.

In the months leading up to the August 2021 seizure of Kabul by the Taliban, Afghan Christian leaders began receiving threatening letters – indicating that the Taliban knew who they were and where they lived. Some were able to escape to Pakistan, a few hundred others managed to fly to other countries. However, many more were trapped inside Afghanistan, needing regularly to move from house to house to avoid detection by the Taliban. Some Christian leaders courageously chose to stay.

However, all Afghan Christians in Pakistan are now at risk – with those who fled the Taliban two years ago now facing the immediate risk of arrest by the Pakistani authorities and deportation to Afghanistan.

Afghan refugees

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees there are 3.2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, but only 1.7 million have ever managed to obtain registered refugee status. Some of those who haven’t, have been given an Afghan Citizen’s Card – a sort of temporary ID by the Pakistan government in the past – but around a million Afghans don’t even have one of those. This latter group includes an estimated 600,000 people who fled the Taliban in late 2021. It is these that the government is threatening with arrest and deportation.

Between 15 September 2023 and 19 January this year more than half a million Afghan refugees fled back to an uncertain future in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, with 91% citing as their reason for doing so being fear of arrest by the Pakistani authorities. The longstanding difficulties many Afghans have had in obtaining refugee registration in Pakistan had meant that they have always lived a precarious existence, with the authorities at best turning a blind eye to them provided they remained within the local area. However, the prospect of arrest and detention by the Pakistani police would almost inevitably require them to pay large bribes as well as putting both men and women at risk of serious physical and sexual violence. That is why so many are now fleeing.

Why is Pakistan doing this?

Pakistan is a country in crisis – with a major economic crisis which had led to the closure of a third of its textile mills. Inflation hit 38 percent last year and the international Monetary Fund only agreed another bailout – the 23^rd since Pakistan became independent – with stringent conditions such getting rid of government subsidies for energy, which has led to massive increases in fuel prices for both ordinary people and factories. 

So, in a sense expelling Afghan refugees is what media operators and politicians in the west call “a dead cat strategy” – throwing a dead cat on the table to distract everyone from some other topic that you would rather they weren’t talking about.

Added to this there have been a string of suicide bombings, some of the them almost certainly linked to the Pakistan Taliban (Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP). This is an issue that the Lindisfarne Centre warned about in June 2023 – when it became clear that Al Qaeda were now basing themselves in Afghanistan and helping train the Pakistan Taliban – who had then regrouped across Pakistan.

The Pakistan government, which is facing a general election on 8 February, has played on this, as Michael Kugleman, Director of the South Asia Institute at US foreign policy think tank the Wilson Center wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in November last year:

“It’s clear that Afghans have become scapegoats as Pakistan weathers both one of its worst economic crises in years and a major resurgence of terrorism by the Afghanistan-based Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Last month, interim Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti accused Afghans of being involved in organized crime and terrorism and indirectly accused them of hampering Pakistan’s economic recovery.”

However, the truth is that many Pakistanis actually sympathise with what their government is doing. There is a sense many have of having become tired of hosting Afghan refugees in their country for the last 45 years. This moderately phrased opinion piece in Pakistan’s Frontier Post is a very telling insight into the compassion fatigue that a host community can all to easily begin to feel.

And then of course – in a country where even Pakistani Christians are regarded at best as something of a social aberration, the chances of the Pakistani government or wider public opinion even considering the fate Afghan Christians are being sent back to face, are almost completely non-existent.

Is it legal?

So, the question arises is what Pakistan is doing legal?

Pakistan is a signatory to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 14 of which states that:

“Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

As a neighbouring country to the one from which the refugees have directly come, it clearly does have a legal responsibility. However, it has never signed up to the 1951 Refugee Convention which the UK, USA and many other western and a large number of non-western countries are signatories to. This specifically prohibits (Article 33) the expulsion of a refugee to their own country where their “life or freedom would be threatened” on account of their “religion”.

However, Pakistan has, almost uniquely not signed the Refugee Convention. Even Afghanistan signed it in 2005 a few years after the Taliban had originally been ousted. As such, the legal position rests on the generalised statement of Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what is known as "international customary law". This is a collection of legal assumptions, such as the longstanding acceptance that piracy on the high seas is a "crime", that for a considerable time have been widely accepted as having some legal status, without necessarily having been formally agreed between countries.  One of those principles of international customary law is the principle of “non-refoulment” – that a refugee who has fled persecution in their own country cannot be returned to the country where they face persecution.

How can pressure be brought on Pakistan?

In practice, it is likely that the Pakistan government would try to simply ignore this.  However, what it is currently very sensitive to is economic pressure. For example, last year the EU signed a further extension of its preferential trading agreement with Pakistan as the previous one was due to expire at the end of December 2023.  This was dependent on Pakistan making progress on a range of international human rights conventions.

As a matter of urgency therefore, the EU should consider suspending this favourable trading status until Pakistan halts the mass deportation of Afghan refugees, including Afghan Christians back to Pakistan. While other countries such as the UK, should make trade agreements with Pakistan dependent on the latter signing up to both the Refugee Convention and other international conventions that protect those at risk of religious persecution.