By Sundus Kawish
On 1st September, the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) sent a public notice to every recognized medical and dental college in the country, barring the admission of Afghan nationals for the current session and suspending all transfers and migration applications involving Afghan students. Granting retrospective effect to the directive, it also ordered the medical colleges that all Afghan nationals already enrolled in respective institutions are “required to return to Afghanistan” with administration to “facilitate” their departure. The Council asserted that the matter is of “highest priority” and related to “national policy directives.”
Shortly thereafter, one of the most prestigious medical colleges, King Edward Medical University (KEMU) expelled 20 Afghan MBBS students out of which 5 are in their final year. This is likely the beginning of wave of expulsions that might dominate media headlines in coming days. The directive issued by PMDC and the expected expulsion by respective colleges have jeopardized the future of thousands of Afghan students.Exercised under the guise of “repatriation”, this policy lacks any statutory backing and acts like the Sword of Damocles falling upon those young students who are being forcibly expelled to a such a land with which many have little connection.
Legally, PMDC holds no authority to issue any such policy for the deportation and expulsion of Afghan Nationals. Section 9 of the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council Act, 2022 sets out what the Council may do, and it is a closed list. It entails nothing that permits the Council to decide which nationalities may remain in this country, or to instruct universities to arrange their exit.That matter is the sole jurisdiction of Immigration Authorities, however since the authorities find the legal route inconvenient and cumbersome, they have resorted to such illegal administrative directives. As per the reports of a media outlet, an “in principle” decision was made to send Afghan students back to their ancestor’s homeland, due to the ongoing tensions between Islamabad and Kabul
The lawful route of removing foreign nationals is governed by the Foreigners Act, 1946 which comes under the domain of federal government through the Interior Ministry. However, that legal route might create unnecessary complications for the federal government because it can be easily judicially scrutinized. In July, the Peshawar High Court (PHC) directed the federal government to review roughly 140 Afghan cases on the principle of non-refoulment and restrained further deportation and ordered the government to decide within sixty days otherwise temporary residence permits were to be issued. Again in August, PHC ordered security agencies to not to detain and deport two Afghan journalists and a former soldier and the ministry was provided sixty days again to decide the matter.
However the authorities and proponents of Islamabad’s decisions argue that Pakistan is not a party to 1951 Refugee Convention, yet, the country has ratified International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which protects the right to education and prohibits discrimination on the ground of national origin. It has ratified the Convention against Torture, whose Article 3 bar on returning a person to serious harm is now widely treated as customary. These obligations do not evaporate because a directive was issued by a medical council rather than a ministry or just because tensions are arising across the Kabul’s border.
Beyond its ultra vires nature to international norms and customs, the policy puts the female students into extreme peril. Afghan women were shut out of universities back in 2022. The final nail in the coffin came in December 2024 when Taliban government banned nursing and midwifery at private institutes as well, so a woman in Afghanistan today cannot train in medicine at any level.Out of those 20 expelled students, 4 are female. This deportation for them is not simple expulsion from a country, it forcefully sends them back to a regressive state that has completely banned any kind of education for the females, back to a government that has been committing gender persecution, as acknowledged by the International Criminal Court, with no guarantee of security of their life, let alone any hope for academic excellence. For three years Pakistani officials and representatives have stood at conferences in Geneva and Doha, condemning all the barbarous acts of Taliban towards Afghan women. But now the same state is contradicting itself by forcefully sending these women back to the regime that has been committing atrocities against them.
Over the past three decades, Pakistan hosted an estimated number of more than five million Afghans. However, with the geopolitical shifts, the country is insistent to deport millions of those within a short period. Since Pakistan’s Apex committee plan to expel undocumented refugees, nearly 600,000 Afghans have been forced to return back to Afghanistan. As per Human Rights Watch, In 2026 alone, more than 146,000 Afghans have been deported from Pakistan, with the numbers increasing since April 1. This forceful repatriation, which is illegal under international frameworks is neither discussed in the mainstream media nor much awareness of its perilous impacts are being raised on social media. The authorities swept under the rug, all these illegal acts of deportation and expulsion, by calling it repatriation, a term rooted in patria; something at the far end that belongs to you, implying one’s return back to their homeland. However, realistically there is nothing waiting at the far end for all these Afghans especially,for the women, for whom there might be something considerably worse waiting for them at the door to Kabul, than nothing. Something that would completely destroy their academic futures and strip them of their fundamental human rights.