PHC orders Interior Ministry to restore citizenship of 65 Chitrali families

PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Wednesday ordered the Ministry of Interior to restore citizenship of 65 Pakistani families from the Chitral district as they were not Afghan nationals, but had shifted to the border area with Afghanistan.

A two-member bench comprising Chief Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel and Justice Muhammad Ghazanfar allowed the writ petition. It issued directions to Ministry of Interior to restore the Pakistani citizenship of these residents of Chitral.

The bench termed the government stance wrong as it had decided that the citizenship of Pakistanis would be cancelled merely for the reasons that they had received ration cards and got benefits meant for the Afghan refugees.

Muhammad Yaqoob and others, residents of Ghahirat area of the Chitral district, had filed the writ petition seeking Pakistani citizenship. They claimed they had been seeking the citizenship of Pakistan for the last five decades from the government.

They argued that the 65 families comprising hundreds of individuals are facing hardships as the authorities concerned were not giving them nationality.  Earlier, the court had restrained the local administration from expelling them from the district and forcing them to get refugee cards.

The petitioners’ lawyers, Muhammad Asif and Mohibullah Terichvi, submitted before the bench that the families were forcibly expelled from Chitral in 1951. They argued that these families migrated to Afghanistan and then took refuge in an area along the Afghan border.

They said after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, these families returned to their native area in Chitral and applied to the Ministry of Interior for issuance of certificates of Pakistani citizenship. The lawyers said the local administration had cleared them as the citizen of Pakistan, but the Ministry of Interior was not issuing them citizenship certificates.