ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has struck down a provision of the Passport Rules, 2021 that allowed authorities to put a citizen on a no-travel list on the recommendation of government agencies or departments, without providing legal safeguards.

The Passport Control List (PCL) is a government mechanism used to prevent individuals from obtaining or renewing passports or traveling abroad. Under the Passport Rules, 2021, citizens’ names could be placed on the list on the recommendation of government agencies or departments, a provision that rights advocates had criticized for lacking transparency, due process and judicial oversight.

A citizen, Moin-ud-Din, this year moved the Islamabad High Court against the law after he was offloaded at Islamabad airport in Dec. 2025 while traveling to Saudi Arabia for Umrah. Din stated that he had a valid Pakistani passport, a Saudi visa and a confirmed air ticket, but no reason was communicated to him for stopping him from traveling.

IHC’s Justice Inaam Ameen Minhas noted that the citizen’s passport had never been impounded, confiscated, canceled or inactivated, nor had its issuance or renewal been refused, observing that the dispute therefore centered on the question whether a government agency had the authority to restrain a citizen from traveling on a valid passport.

“The refusal of a passport and the prohibition of travel are two separate exercises of power, resting upon different footings and attended by different consequences,” the court stated in the detailed verdict issued on Saturday.

“To conflate the two is to assume that a power to withhold a document carries within it a power to arrest movement, the law admits of no such assumption.”

The sub-rule (2) of Rule 22 of the Passports Rules, 2021 states that the division concerned and the directorate general shall prepare and maintain a PCL for placement of names and other record of individuals who have been refused passport facilities for their involvement in “anti-state activities or whose visit to foreign countries is considered to be prejudicial to the State interest, or, whose visit abroad is banned from security point of view.”

“It is declared that the second limb of clause (b) of sub-rule (2) of Rule 22 of the Passports Rules, 2021, namely ‘The names of persons included in the category under this clause may also be placed on the recommendations of government agencies or departments,’ is ultra vires the Passports Act, 1974 and the Constitution of 1973 and is of no legal effect,” the court

The normal period of retaining a person on the PCL is five years, according to Passports Rules, 2021. A person may be kept on PCL even beyond five years provided the referring department or agency recommends further retention having full justification in this regard.

According to the judgment, Din’s name was placed on the PCL in Dec. 2024 on the recommendation of National Central Bureau-INTERPOL, forwarded by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency. The action followed his deportation from the UK after his conviction for causing death by dangerous driving. He had served a three-year sentence.