The fifth “Afghanistan-Pakistan Refugee Bilateral Dialogue”, co-organized by the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies and the Regional Peace Institute (RPI) held from 20th to 21st of May 2016 in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The 5th round of the dialogue principally focused on the Afghan refugee issues under the umbrella theme of “Finding a Sustainable Solution to a Human Crisis: Unraveling the Pak-Afghan Paradigm”.

The sub-themes that came up for discussion in the closed-door sessions on May 20 are the following:

1. The status of refugees amidst a legal vacuum;
2. The societal challenges faced by the refugees and the local population and their multi-faceted impact
3. Repatriation, Relocation or integration: looking for sustainable solutions

The theme of “Political and Strategic Compulsions: Incentive or impediment to the peace process?” took up in the open session on May 21.

The Afghan delegation included representatives of the ministry of refugees and repatriations, international organization for migration (IOM), parliament member, journalists and human right activist. Additionally, 5 members of the Afghan refugee representatives from Peshawar, Lahore, and Islamabad took part in this dialogue.

The 2 day refugee dialogue concluded by drafting a joint statement and shared to large number of stakeholders.

The first, second, third and fourth meetings were held in Islamabad (June 2015), Herat (October 2015), Islamabad (December 2015) and Kabul (January 2016) respectively.