Islamabad High Court Presses Government Over 50 Pakistani Men Missing After 'Dunki' Boat Journeys

More than 50 Pakistani men who left the country on irregular "dunki" migration routes toward Europe have not been heard from in as long as 18 months, according to a petition the Islamabad High Court took up on October 7, prompting the court to order the federal government to report on their whereabouts.

What the court ordered

Justice Arbab Muhammad Tahir heard the petition, filed by Afzal Hussain Shah and argued by Advocate Shafqat Abbas Tarar, and issued notices to the federal government. The court directed the assistant attorney general to submit a report ahead of the next hearing, set for November 2. The order itself is procedural — it does not locate anyone — but it puts a concrete deadline on a government response in a case that had, until now, moved only through private family appeals to ministries.

The journey the petition describes

According to the petitioner's counsel, the men travelled on different boats from Mauritania, on Africa's Atlantic coast, toward Spain between April 2024 and January 2025. None of them reached their intended destination. The petitioner, who belongs to Phalia tehsil in Mandi Bahauddin district, told the court that families of men from Mandi Bahauddin, Gujranwala, Gujrat and Hafizabad have no reliable information on whether their relatives are stranded somewhere along the route, held in immigration detention, already deported, or alive at all. The Mauritania-to-Spain Atlantic crossing is one of the longer and more dangerous irregular migration routes used by Pakistani men seeking informal passage to Europe, typically arranged through smuggling networks collectively referred to in Pakistan as the "dunki" trade.

What the petitioner is asking for

Shah's petition asks the court to direct Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to open consular inquiries in the countries the men are believed to have passed through or reached, and to have Pakistani embassies and consulates assist in physically tracing them. It also asks for an examination of immigration, travel and other available government records that might show whether any of the men were ever logged entering a country, detained, or repatriated. The petitioner says he had already written directly to the prime minister, the foreign minister and the interior minister before turning to the court, without receiving a substantive response.

Part of a wider pattern the courts keep confronting

This petition is one of several irregular-migration and missing-persons cases working through Pakistan's superior courts this year. The Islamabad High Court separately ruled in September on passport control lists, a mechanism the state uses to try to stop people, including those suspected of planning irregular travel, from leaving the country in the first place — a tool that, this case suggests, has not stopped the practice it targets. The human cost of the underlying migration route is well documented: a boat carrying migrants from Mauritania toward Spain capsized in January 2025, with as many as 44 Pakistanis feared dead, a tragedy that put the same Atlantic crossing this petition describes under international scrutiny. Build Better Pakistan has not found reporting tying the specific 50-plus men named in Shah's petition to that capsizing, and the court filing does not make that connection either; the overlap is in timing and route, not a confirmed shared incident.

Why families are turning to the courts at all

Petitions like this one typically surface only after informal channels — appeals to the Federal Investigation Agency, to foreign ministries, to the missing men's own contacts abroad — have gone nowhere for months or years. That pattern echoes what rights groups have separately documented in Balochistan's enforced-disappearance cases briefed to the UN in September, where families likewise describe exhausting every available channel before resorting to litigation. The cases differ in almost every particular — state custody versus an informal smuggling route, a single province versus men from four different districts — but the throughline is the same: families with no state mechanism reliably built to answer "where is he," forced into court simply to get an official reply on the record.

What happens next

The case returns to the Islamabad High Court on November 2, when the assistant attorney general is due to report back. Whether that report contains anything beyond an acknowledgment that the inquiry is ongoing will be the first real test of whether this petition produces answers for the families involved, or simply another procedural notice in a case that, like many missing-persons petitions before it, could stretch on for years.

Build Better Pakistan's Rights Desk covers access to justice, irregular migration and civil-rights litigation in Pakistan's courts.