Justice Khalid Ishaq of the Lahore High Court ordered that the stay preventing the removal of Afghan medical students remain in force until the next hearing, but he did not set a specific date for that hearing, leaving the students in legal limbo.
The stay follows a letter from the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) sent earlier this month, which warned that no “form of facilitation of Afghan nationals is permitted for the current academic session” and demanded that all Afghans enrolled in medical or dental programmes return to Afghanistan.
Afghan students expressed shock and despair at the order; one student told AFP that the directive felt “like the death of my hopes to become a doctor,” while a 23‑year‑old woman, just days from completing her second year, was told she must “go back and leave everything.”
Human Rights Watch urged Pakistani authorities to reverse the PMDC order, highlighting the plight of Afghan women barred from studying in Afghanistan, and Amnesty International condemned the move as “discriminatory and arbitrary.”
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have deteriorated since the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021, culminating in weeks of armed clashes earlier this year and a UN‑recorded deportation of more than 2.5 million Afghans from Pakistan over the past three years.
Legal challenges to the PMDC order are spreading: a similar petition was rejected by a court in Balochistan, another is pending in Sindh, and lawyers for the Lahore petitioners say the case could be taken to Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court if the stay is lifted.
Individual stories illustrate the human cost: Mubin Ulfati, a final‑year student, was given 24 hours to leave the country after a hospital shift; a fourth‑year ophthalmology student, who had spent over a year trying to renew his visa, was expelled within two days; and an unnamed female scholar, one of roughly 20 Afghan women out of 30,000 applicants to win a Pakistani scholarship, now faces an uncertain future.