‘I want to cry’: Afghan medical students in Pakistan face expulsion fear

Islamabad, Pakistan – Alishba*, a medical student, was on a maternity ward night shift in Lahore when her phone began filling with messages on September 8.

“Someone said, ‘We’ve received a notification that almost 20 students are being expelled,’” she told Al Jazeera. “My first reaction was, this is nonsense. How could a government expel students from universities without any reason?”

By morning, it was not nonsense. She was one of nearly two dozen Afghan nationals named on her college’s expulsion list, circulating on Facebook within hours, all given less than three days to prepare to leave the only country where, as a woman, she has been able to study medicine at all.

On September 1, the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC), the country’s medical regulator, ordered universities and colleges to send enrolled Afghan students home. They were also barred from any new admissions, transfers or migrations of Afghan nationals for the current academic year.

In all, more than 200 Afghan students are currently enrolled in Pakistani medical or dental colleges, according to the PMDC, and most of them have been hit.

On September 11, they got temporary reprieve: Lahore High Court on Friday suspended the implementation of the PMDC directives, hearing petitions from Afghan students. The petitioners, represented by advocate Asad Jamal, argued PMDC had exceeded its jurisdiction under its own governing act and that students had been “condemned unheard”, their rights to education, life and dignity violated without any opportunity to respond.

The court noted some petitioners had studied in Pakistan for four years before now being told to leave. “Until yesterday, these were favoured children,” Justice Khalid Ishaq remarked. “Today, the policy has changed.”

The case returns to court on September 18, by which point PMDC, the Ministry of National Health Services, and the vice chancellors of affected institutions are required to file their responses. Until then, the students have respite from any punitive measure, Jamal, their lawyer, said.