Double the misery

UN refugee agency reports that 88 Pakistani nationals have been deported from Sri Lanka since the first of August.

A Sri Lankan court on September 1 ruled that the Sri Lankan authorities were right to seek the expulsion of a group of Pakistani asylum seekers, saying that they were a threat to the public health and security of the island state. The state in making its case to the court appealed against an earlier ruling that suspended the deportation, saying that there was evidence that the asylum seekers were bringing malaria into the country — patently nonsensical as malaria is not transmissible human-to-human only by the bite of an infected mosquito — and that they were ‘committing crimes’. Pakistani asylum seekers who end up in Sri Lanka have not had an easy time of it, and many of them are members of the Ahmadi community, which has been persecuted in Pakistan for decades and is discriminated against constitutionally. The Ahmadis are by nature peaceful and whilst it is not impossible that they are involved in crime in Sri Lanka, it seems unlikely to be anything on the scale of organised crime.

The asylum seekers are now open to deportation, back to the country which many of those of them who are Ahmadi had good cause to flee. The very fact that they have attracted attention to themselves by going to Sri Lanka is a virtual guarantee that they will be on the receiving end of some unwelcome attention when they arrive back in Pakistan — they will have been doubly cursed by virtue of their faith. The United Nations refugee agency reports that 88 Pakistani nationals have been deported since the first of August in what it claims is a breach of international law. There are another 75 awaiting deportation. The UN is adamant that those claiming asylum for reasons of religious persecution must have their cases particularly closely investigated. Unfortunately, for the asylum seekers Sri Lanka is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention — a fact most will be unaware of before they took flight. These people got no protection in Pakistan, and are being ejected from Sri Lanka on the thinnest of pretexts. Injustice knows no bounds.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 5^th, 2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.