Additional Interior Secretary Salman Chaudhry said on Thursday that the United Arab Emirates had not been issuing visas to Pakistanis.
Pakistan and the UAE share close diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties. The UAE is one of Pakistan’s largest trading partners in the Middle East and a major source of remittances, with a large Pakistani expatriate population living and working there.
The secretary made this revelation during a meeting of the Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights, further stating that Saudi Arabia and the UAE had “stopped short of imposing a ban on the Pakistani passport”.
“If a ban is imposed, getting it removed would be difficult,” he warned.
The official said that currently, the UAE was only issuing visas to blue and diplomatic passport holders.
Separately, Senator Samina Mumtaz Zehri, who heads the Senate committee on human rights, also confirmed that the interior ministry official’s remarks to Dawn. She said the bar was attributed to concerns about people travelling to the UAE and “getting involved in criminal activities”.
The committee was told that the UAE was not issuing visas to Pakistanis and that very few had been issued in the recent past “after much difficulty”, she said.
UAE envoy shares steps to facilitate visa processing
On the other hand, UAE Ambassador to Pakistan Salem M. Salem Al Bawab Al Zaabi shared “major UAE visa facilitation reforms for Pakistanis” with Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb today, the latter’s ministry said.
The reforms discussed during their meeting in Islamabad included online visa processing, e-visas without passport stamping, and faster system-to-system linkages, the finance ministry said on X.
Nearly 500 visas were being processed daily at the newly launched UAE Visa Centre in Pakistan, the statement added.
