LAHORE: Twenty-five Pakistani citizens imprisoned in India have returned home through the Wagah-Attari border.
According to the Pakistan High Commission, the 25 Pakistani citizens were brought into Pakistan today via the Wagah-Attari border. High Commission officials were also present at the border and assisted in facilitating the process of the citizens’ return home.
The Pakistan High Commission said the Government of Pakistan will continue its efforts for the release and repatriation of all Pakistani citizens imprisoned in Indian jails.
Repatriations of this kind are not one-off gestures. They operate under a bilateral arrangement dating to 2008, the Agreement on Consular Access, under which India and Pakistan exchange lists of each other’s nationals held in their prisons twice a year — on 1 January and 1 July — and are required to provide consular access to detainees and to release and repatriate them within a month of the confirmation of their national status and the completion of their sentences.
The category most affected is fishermen. Both countries’ fishing fleets work the waters near Sir Creek, where the maritime boundary is disputed and unmarked, and boats crossing an invisible line are detained routinely. Fishermen typically serve their sentences and then remain in custody for months or years afterwards while nationality verification is processed — the administrative step that determines when repatriation can occur. Their boats are almost never returned.
The second category is people who crossed the border inadvertently or without documents, including a persistent number with mental health conditions, and a smaller number held on serious charges.
Nationality verification is the bottleneck, and it is a bureaucratic one rather than a political one — though it is exposed to political weather. When relations deteriorate, verification slows; when a diplomatic channel opens, batches of long-completed cases are cleared at once. That is why repatriations tend to arrive in groups of a few dozen rather than continuously.
The humanitarian arithmetic is stark. Detainees on both sides are overwhelmingly poor, and the families of fishermen in Thatta, Badin and the Gujarat coast lose their sole earner for years over an offence that, on land, would be a trespass. The Pakistan–India Judicial Committee on Prisoners, comprising retired judges from both countries, was created specifically to visit jails and recommend releases; it has functioned intermittently and has been dormant for extended periods.
Each repatriation is a good day for 25 families and a small data point in a much larger unresolved file. The measures that would actually reduce the caseload are known and are not technically difficult. A no-arrest policy for inadvertent fishermen crossings, prompt return of impounded boats, and automatic release upon completion of sentence without waiting for verification.
None of them require a broader thaw in the relationship. All of them have been proposed before.
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