Amnesty International Calls On Pakistan To Immediately Release Afghan Refugees

Amnesty International issued a statement on Friday calling for the immediate release of Afghan refugees held by Pakistani police.

Pakistani police have detained hundreds of Afghan refugees in the cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad in recent days and deported a number of them.

Amnesty International on Friday, January 17, called on the Pakistani government to repeal its new policy of requiring additional documents, such as a No Objection Certificate (NOC), to stay in Islamabad.

The organisation said that Pakistan's new order is putting vulnerable and at-risk Afghan groups in a bad situation. "The New Year has been marked by fear and anxiety for Afghan refugees in Islamabad, as police launched night-time raids, harassing and arbitrarily detaining hundreds of Afghan refugees," the organisation said in a statement.

For the past two weeks, Pakistani police have been going from street to street and house to house in the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi in search of Afghan migrants, arresting undocumented migrants and, in a number of cases, even migrants with visas.

Among the detainees are women and children.

According to statistics from the Taliban embassy in Islamabad, Islamabad police arrested about 800 Afghan refugees in the first week alone.