Lahore High Court extends stay on order sending Afghan medical students home

The Lahore High Court on Friday extended its suspension of a Pakistan Medical and Dental Council order that told colleges to send Afghan medical and dental students back to Afghanistan. Justice Khalid Ishaq did not set a new hearing date. Lawyers for the PMDC and the University of Health Sciences asked for more time to file written replies.

The council’s letter of 1 September instructed public and private institutions to complete the paperwork, including no-objection certificates, so that Afghan students could leave. It also barred new admissions, transfers or placements of Afghan nationals for the current session. A 31 July notice had pointed in the same direction. Colleges in Lahore then moved to expel named students.

Thirteen Afghan students at King Edward Medical University, Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Medical and Dental College and the Services Institute of Medical Sciences petitioned the court on 10 September. On Thursday five graduates of the Shaikh Khalifa college, Nazrana, Azatullah Stanikzai, Hashmatullah Stanikzai, Ali Talash and Abdullah Mansoor, filed a separate case. They finished a five-year MBBS under the Higher Education Commission’s Allama Iqbal Scholarship in the 2021-2026 session. Without PMDC registration they cannot start the mandatory house job, so the degree does not become a licence.

Estimates of the affected group differ. The PMDC has said more than 200 Afghan students are enrolled and that only 22 are registered with the council, 14 of them already graduated and eight close to graduation. A student spokesman, Anayatullah Momand, put the figure near 1,000, with about 65 percent holding valid visas. The BBC saw visas belonging to students it interviewed. The council’s lawyer told the BBC that none of the Afghan students were registered.

A health ministry official described an “in-principle” decision to send Afghan medical students home amid tension between Islamabad and Kabul. Foreign Office spokesman Sajjad Haider Khan pointed to the Illegal Foreigner Repatriation Plan and said any foreign national without a valid visa and passport is liable to deportation. Former Pakistani envoys to Kabul asked the council to reconsider. One called the order a question of humanity and of Pakistan’s own responsibility.

For women students the stakes are sharper. The Taliban government bars women from secondary and higher education and from most work. A woman sent back from a Pakistani medical college cannot continue the same degree in Afghanistan. Several of the Lahore petitioners are women. The court stay is the only document that keeps them in class or in a house-job queue.

The legal argument in the graduate petition is narrow. PMDC’s 2025 regulations give graduating students a right to a house job at the affiliated teaching hospital. The 2022 Act that governs the council does not, the lawyers say, give it power to order deportations. The council answers that foreign students must be registered and that most Afghan names on college books are not.

A court in Balochistan has already rejected a similar petition. A case in Sindh is pending. Punjab is now the only large province where a stay is in force. That split means an Afghan student in Quetta and an Afghan student in Lahore live under different rules this week.

Pakistan has forced or induced the departure of more than 2.5 million Afghans in three years. The medical-student file is smaller and more specific. It concerns people admitted by Pakistani colleges, in some cases funded by a Pakistani scholarship, who are now told that the same state will not register them or house them through a house job. The Lahore court has not decided that dispute. It has only refused to let the expulsion letters take effect while the regulator writes a reply.