UAE not issuing visas to Pakistanis: Official

The UAE is not issuing visas to Pakistanis, a senior interior ministry official told a parliamentary panel on Thursday, revealing that the country narrowly escaped a passport ban from the Gulf nation. Additional Interior Secretary Salman Chaudhry made the revelation during a meeting of the Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights, Dawn newspaper reported.

The paper further quoted him as saying 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. He said that currently, the UAE was only issuing visas to blue and diplomatic passport holders. A Pakistani blue passport is an official passport issued to government officials and other entitled personnel, as opposed to the common green passport issued to ordinary citizens.

Senator Samina Mumtaz Zehri, who heads the Senate committee on human rights, confirmed the interior ministry official’s remarks to the paper.  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. 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 on Thursday, 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, further outlining reforms shared by the envoy. 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. But Pakistani citizens faced visa rejections in early July, which prompted Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi to raise the issue with his UAE counterpart. In a meeting on July 11, UAE Lt Gen Sheikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan assured Naqvi of “full support” in expediting visas for Pakistani citizens as the Pakistani minister sought “relaxation in visa policies”.