London-based Afghan charity seeks a role in Britain’s new sponsorship routes, acknowledges the pressure Pakistan has carried and says arrivals starting in the hundreds may fall short as more than 715,000 Afghans have left Pakistan this year.
LAHORE: Britain’s largest Afghan community charity has welcomed London’s decision to reopen a refugee resettlement scheme and is lobbying to help choose who gets a place, a move that could open a narrow route out for some of the Afghans in Pakistan who were left waiting when the UK closed its Afghan-specific schemes last year.
The Afghanistan and Central Asian Association (ACAA), based in Feltham, west London, said it wants to become an approved sponsor under the Home Office’s planned community sponsorship route and to work with universities, employers and the UN refugee agency UNHCR to identify refugees for resettlement, study and jobs in Britain.
“Many refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries, including Pakistan and Iran, remain at risk of detention, deportation and forced return,” said Darius Nasimi, the charity’s head of funding and partnerships, in a statement issued on Nov. 1.
In written answers to questions from The Lahore Times, the charity acknowledged the strain on its host country. “We recognise that Pakistan has hosted large numbers of Afghan refugees for several decades and that this has placed considerable pressure on the country’s public services, infrastructure and host communities,” Nasimi said.
Britain New Legal Routes Expand Refugee Resettlement
The Home Office reopened the UK Resettlement Scheme to new referrals on Sept. 28, with around one in four referrals expected to be Afghan women and girls or Palestinian refugees. Referrals come only through UNHCR and the International Refugee Assistance Project, not directly from applicants or charities.
The government has also announced three new sponsorship routes. Charities could apply to become community sponsors from October, with first arrivals expected in autumn 2027. Universities will be able to sponsor refugee students from the same date, and a work route for employers opens for applications in spring 2027. Arrivals receive a five-year path to settlement.
The scale is modest. The Home Office said total arrivals across the resettlement scheme and the new routes would start “in the hundreds”, growing to the low thousands as irregular migration falls, under an annual cap. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has paired the new legal routes with tougher asylum rules, saying she would close “loopholes that have been too often abused”.
None of the new routes reopens the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme or the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, which closed to new applicants in July 2025 and were the main channels for Afghans who had worked with British forces or were deemed at high risk.
Afghan Returns from Pakistan
For Pakistan, which has hosted Afghan refugees for more than four decades, the numbers on the other side of the ledger are far larger. About 715,400 Afghans returned from Pakistan in 2026 up to Oct. 3, according to UNHCR data, including about 68,800 deportations. Since September 2023, when Islamabad began its drive against foreigners without legal status, about 2.74 million Afghans have gone back, according to a joint IOM and UNHCR update cited by Dawn.
Punjab alone had deported more than 140,000 Afghan nationals by August. Pakistani officials say the campaign targets only those without valid documents and is driven by security concerns, after a string of militant attacks that authorities and religious leaders have linked to networks operating from Afghanistan.
In the week to Oct. 17, 517 Afghans were arrested, 97pc of them holding Afghan Citizen Cards or no documents, and 3,883 returned through Torkham, Chaman and Bahramcha. Most returnees said fear of arrest was their main reason for leaving.
Islamabad has long argued that Western governments that promised to relocate Afghans who worked with them should move faster, rather than leave them in Pakistan for years while their cases are processed. Britain’s reopened scheme does not directly address that backlog.
Caught between two systems
Darius Nasimi exclusively told The Lahore Times said the ACAA remains in contact with many Afghans living in Pakistan, including families facing deportation or the threat of forced return, some of them living in UNHCR-supported settlements or seeking help from the UN agency. It is particularly concerned about women and girls, former government employees, journalists and human rights defenders.
Nasimi said the ACAA did not have a verified figure for how many people were awaiting decisions under the Afghan schemes when Britain closed them to new applications in July 2025. But she said the charity knew of people it had supported or been in contact with who were affected by those schemes and have since been deported or forced to return from Pakistan to Afghanistan. She did not give details, citing the need to review case documents and to protect the safety and confidentiality of those involved.
The ACAA has not raised these cases with Pakistani authorities or the British High Commission in Islamabad, saying it does not yet have contacts in the relevant departments. It said it would welcome such links.
The charity wants Britain to “strengthen cooperation with Pakistan, UNHCR and other international organisations to ensure that vulnerable Afghan refugees have access to appropriate protection and safe, lawful resettlement opportunities”, and to publish clearer rules on eligibility and referrals.
Is the cap enough?
The ACAA called the reopening of the scheme “an important and positive development”, but said an initial intake “numbering only in the hundreds may be insufficient given the scale of humanitarian needs affecting Afghan refugees, particularly those stranded in Pakistan and Iran.”
It declined to name a target, saying numbers should be based on humanitarian need, protection assessments and the capacity of receiving communities. It called for transparency on annual targets and on how many places go to the most vulnerable groups.
UK University Sponsorship Offers a Potential Route
The charity’s proposals put particular weight on Afghan women and girls, who have been barred from secondary and university education under Taliban rule, which has also banned all protests under a new police law. It wants to help British universities identify refugees whose studies were interrupted and support them with language preparation and paperwork.
Pakistan has been dealing with the same question at home. The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council ordered Afghan medical and dental students to return in September before the Lahore High Court barred colleges from expelling them. Students in such cases could, in principle, be candidates for a university-sponsored route to Britain, though selection would rest with UK institutions and the Home Office.
ACAA Seeks Sponsorship Accreditation to Expand Support
The ACAA was founded in 1999 by Dr Nooralhaq Nasimi and describes itself as the largest charity serving Afghan and Central Asian communities in Britain, offering legal advice, English classes, employment support and women’s programmes.
“ACAA was founded by refugees, for refugees,” Nasimi said. “My family and I came to the United Kingdom after fleeing Afghanistan, and we know from personal experience how life-changing the opportunity to rebuild one’s life in safety can be.”
The charity has not yet applied to become a sponsor but is working towards accreditation as a Lead Sponsor Organisation and seeking partnerships with accredited sponsors, universities, employers and local authorities, citing almost 30 years of work with refugees and asylum seekers. It also wants to work with resettlement contractors on housing, language and integration. It also wants a mechanism to bring especially vulnerable cases, including those in Pakistan and Iran, to the attention of UNHCR and other authorised referral partners, while acknowledging that decisions rest with UNHCR and the Home Office.
Charity Calls for Clearer UK Resettlement Rules
The ACAA urged the British government to publish clear rules on eligibility, referral procedures, sponsor requirements and timelines, and to involve refugee-led organisations in designing and running the new routes. It said priority should go to those at greatest risk, including women and girls, journalists, human rights defenders, former public servants, ethnic and religious minorities, and people facing forced return from neighbouring countries.
With first arrivals on the community and study routes not expected until autumn 2027, and numbers capped in the hundreds at the outset, the routes are unlikely to change the situation for most Afghans in Pakistan soon. For the few who qualify, the charity’s role could decide whether they are noticed at all.
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