Islamabad : Pakistan has deported around 600,000 Afghan refugees in eight months since July 2016, making it the “world’s largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees”, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said in a report.
HRW, in its report, ‘Pakistan Coercion, UN Complicity: The Mass Forced Return of Afghan Refugees’, has said that more than 100 refugees from Afghanistan described how the community was forced to return to their conflict-torn land, Geo News reported on Monday.
In the 76-page report, Afghan refugees have narrated their stories of abuses by Pakistan police, extortion, arbitrary detention and deportation threats that intensified in the second half of last year.
“In other instances, their children were either driven out of educational institutes or authorities shut down schools in refugee camps,” it said.
Gerry Simpson, senior researcher at HRW — the author of the report — said: “After decades of hosting Afghan refugees, Pakistan in mid-2016 unleashed the world’s largest recent anti-refugee crackdowns to coerce their mass return.”
Families are being sent back to Afghanistan where the militant insurgency has gained strength, the report said.
