ISLAMABAD: Pakistan should not sign any blanket provisions of a proposed mutual treaty with the United Kingdom for the return of thousands of migrants who have overstayed visit visas, legal experts warned on Wednesday, a day after Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said UK authorities were pushing Pakistan to sign a mutual treaty to take back over 30,000 citizens staying illegally in London.
Qureshi made these remarks while addressing a press conference at the Pakistan High Commission in London on Tuesday.
A senior official at the Pakistan High Commission in London confirmed to Arab News on Wednesday that negotiations for the treaty regarding visa overstayers were ongoing.
“The agreement is in the interest of the people of Pakistan,” he said, declining to be named on account of not being a spokesman for the high commission. “At the moment, the UK is very careful in granting visit visas to Pakistanis due to increased cases of illegal stay but once the readmission treaty is signed, this will help our genuine visa applicants.”
The official did not specify a timeframe for when the treaty would be signed but said "this will definitely take some time.”
Around 1.5 million Pakistanis reside in the UK and remit over $2 billion annually to Pakistan.
Legal experts have advised Pakistani authorities against signing any “blanket provisions” of a mutual treaty for the return of its citizens from the UK who have been illegally staying there.
Muzzammil Mukhtar, solicitor and director of Synthesis Chambers Solicitors London, said UK laws permitted authorities to deport people who had either committed a crime, or entered the country illegally, but there had to be a mutual treaty of readmission with a relevant country for those who entered legally on a visa but overstayed.
“UK authorities are required to confirm identification of overstayers and get their travel documents from relevant embassies and high commissions before sending them back to their home countries,” he told Arab News. “And this process cannot be initiated in the absence of a mutual treaty.”
Mukhtar explained that Pakistanis or citizens of any other country in the UK could apply for asylum and other legal rights, including the right to have a private and family life under the EU Convention on Human Rights, and thus their “administrative removal from the UK is not any easy task.”
“Pakistan should not sign any blank provisions of the readmission treaty with the UK, and accept its citizens back home only after all their legal appeals and options in the courts stand exhausted,” Mukhtar said.
