In latest flare-up of tension between EU and Islamabad, Pakistan rejects 31 people it says were illegally returned

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Thirty-one migrants made a round trip from Greece to Pakistan on Thursday after the government in Islamabad said the EU had illegally deported them.

Although 19 out of the 50 deportees who came in on a charter plane were taken into custody in Pakistan, the remainder stayed on board for almost two hours before returning to Greece after the government said they did not have the correct paperwork.

It was the latest salvo in a row between the EU and Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the Pakistani interior minister angry about the treatment of his compatriots by European states struggling with a migrant crisis.

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“Pakistani laws have been violated, which absolutely cannot be allowed,” Khan said in a statement.

The issue has been a running source of tension with the EU. In early November Khan suspended an agreement on readmitting illegal detainees, saying two EU states were sending Pakistanis home on “baseless terrorism charges”.

“Those who give lectures on fundamental rights to us should also respect fundamental rights of Pakistanis,” he said at the time.

Last week Dimitris Avramopoulos, a Greek politician and the EU commissioner responsible for migration policy, visited Pakistan to try to soothe concerns.

But on Thursday Pakistan said the EU was still not honouring pledges to only return those whose identity had been confirmed, saying the men flown back to Greece were “unverified deportees”.

The EU office in Islamabad said all 50 people on the flight organised by Frontex, the agency in charge of Europe’s borders, had been given passports to travel by the Pakistani embassies in Greece, Bulgaria and Austria.

It said Pakistan’s demand that the migrants should also have their national identity card numbers was impossible for EU officials to organise and that it was not part of the agreement struck with Pakistan.

“The list of names [of the deportees] had been sent to the Pakistani authorities earlier, providing sufficient time to the relevant Pakistani authorities to find the missing numbers for the returnees,” the EU said.

Last year, about 21,000 Pakistanis who were in Europe without permission were ordered to return home. An estimated 50,000 Pakistanis travel legally to Europe for work each year.

Clashes erupted on the Greek-Macedonian border on Tuesday when Macedonian police fired teargas to repel hundreds of mostly Pakistani migrants trying to push through a new border fence.

Some of them later blocked the crossing for Syrians and others who would have been let in as war refugees. “If we don’t cross, no one does!” they chanted.