UK visa refusals

Thousands of applications have been turned down this year without no specific reasons

Conventional wisdom has it that getting a visa of any sort for the UK if you are Pakistani is a lottery. The British will of course deny that stoutly, and make statements to the effect that procedures and protocols are strictly followed and that in the rare instances where a mistake may have been made in rejecting an application, there is always an appeals process. Today it is being alleged that an unusually high number of visa applications are being rejected, some for what are regarded as frivolous reasons, according to a study conducted by the Online news agency, which includes background interviews with applicants. The Online agency concludes that there is an unannounced policy of visa refusal and that “thousands” of applications have been turned down in this year — a number that a British official is said to have confirmed, but gave no further specifics.

It is impossible to verify whether an ‘unannounced’ policy exists at all, but purely anecdotally there does appear to be a higher-than-usual rate of rejection, again impossible to confirm because the British do not issue any hard data into the public domain regarding visa applications. Visas do not come cheap and those for the UK may cost as much as Rs100,000, a sum that is not refundable if the applicant is unsuccessful. Visa refusal might be seen as a useful income generator by the ever-cost-conscious British. Whatever the truth of the matter, the subjective impression being conveyed is that a form of covert discrimination is being applied to Pakistani visa applicants. Failed applicants often do not have the time or resources to go through an appeals process, which itself may appear deliberately arcane and designed to reconfirm the failure rather than facilitate a successful appeal. By refusing to release data beyond a very indeterminate number, the British give the impression that they have something to hide, or at least if not actually hide, then actively manage the flow of information into the public domain to their own advantage. This serves nobody well, least of all those of us whose applications for visas are correctly made only to be arbitrarily turned away.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 22^nd, 2015.

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