Every few months, somewhere in the world, a state expels or threatens to expel a category of foreign nationals, and the exchange that follows is almost scripted. The state cites its sovereign right to control its borders. A human rights body calls the action arbitrary or discriminatory. Commentators on the state’s side accuse the human rights body of overreach, bias, or serving someone else’s interests. Almost nobody engages with the actual legal question underneath, which is not whether states may expel aliens. They plainly may. It is whether a given expulsion was carried out the way the law requires, and that distinction is where nearly every one of these disputes actually lives.
The right nobody disputes
The starting legal point is not controversial. Article 13 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that a lawfully resident alien may be expelled only pursuant to a decision reached in accordance with law, and, except where compelling national security reasons apply, is entitled to have that decision reviewed by a competent authority. Read quickly, that sounds like a rights guarantee. Read carefully, it is also an explicit grant of authority: states may expel foreign nationals, full stop, so long as they do it lawfully. No human rights body seriously argues otherwise, and framing these disputes as “does the state have the right to regulate foreigners” versus “human rights law forbids it” misstates almost every case that gets fought this way.
What Article 13 actually gates is process. A decision “in accordance with law” means the domestic legal basis has to exist and be followed, not invented after the fact or applied selectively by nationality without individualised review. “Compelling reasons of national security” is a real exception, but it is meant to be the exception, not the default justification for any mass action a government wants to take against a group defined by citizenship. This is the seam where almost every recent controversy actually splits, and it shows up in strikingly similar form across very different regions.
Copenhagen: the “your home country is safe now” problem
Denmark offers one of the clearest test cases. Since 2019, Danish authorities have revoked or declined to renew the residency of hundreds of Syrian refugees after officially designating Damascus and its surrounding areas as safe for return. Denmark’s legal position is coherent: temporary protection was always framed as temporary, tied to a threat assessment, and once the assessment changes, the entitlement to stay changes with it. That is a legitimate sovereign argument and nobody seriously disputes Denmark’s authority to structure asylum status that way.
Stay ahead of the geopolitical week.
MD Briefing delivers expert analysis across five global fronts — the Indo-Pacific, energy, geoeconomics, European security, and the Middle East — every Monday morning. Free.
The objection from UNHCR, Amnesty International and the Danish Refugee Council was not that Denmark lacks this authority. It was that the underlying safety assessment was contested by independent experts, that the policy disproportionately affected women and older people while exempting men who faced conscription risk, and that people who lost status could not actually be deported, since Denmark has no diplomatic relations with Damascus, leaving them stranded in indefinite limbo at removal centres unable to work or study. The fight was never about sovereignty. It was about whether the factual basis for the decision held up and whether the people caught by it had a real avenue to contest it individually rather than being swept up in a blanket nationality-wide reassessment.
The Gulf: sponsorship revocation as instant deportation
A structurally similar pattern runs through Gulf labour markets, where residency for most foreign workers is tied to an employer’s sponsorship under the kafala system. When a sponsor cancels that sponsorship, whether for legitimate cause, a labour dispute, or simple retaliation, the worker’s legal status can collapse within days, triggering detention and deportation with little independent review. The International Labour Organization and rights groups have pressed Gulf states for years on the absence of a workable appeals mechanism for workers facing this kind of status collapse, not on whether the state may condition residency on employment at all. Several Gulf governments have since introduced portability reforms specifically to address the “no independent review” complaint, which is itself an acknowledgment that the process objection, not the sovereignty objection, was the one with teeth.
Washington: status that expires by memo
The United States runs a different but related version of the same argument through Temporary Protected Status, a designation that shields nationals of certain crisis-hit countries from deportation and is renewed or terminated at the discretion of the Department of Homeland Security. Successive administrations have used that discretion in opposite directions, expanding TPS for some nationalities and abruptly terminating it for others, and each termination round has produced the same pattern of litigation: plaintiffs arguing the decision was arbitrary and capricious under US administrative law, insufficiently reasoned, or motivated by factors outside the statute rather than an actual change in country conditions. Courts have sometimes sided with the government and sometimes issued injunctions, but the legal fight in every round has been about the adequacy of the government’s stated reasoning, not about whether Washington has the underlying authority to set immigration status. It always does. The question is whether it used that authority in a way a reviewing court will accept as non-arbitrary.
Islamabad: a narrower version of the same question
Pakistan’s current situation fits the same structural pattern, on a smaller and more recent scale than the other three. In September 2026, Pakistan’s Medical and Dental Council ordered colleges to expel currently enrolled Afghan students and barred new Afghan admissions for the academic year, part of a broader repatriation effort under which more than 2.6 million Afghans have returned from Pakistan since late 2023. Pakistan’s stated justification, that militant networks it says operate from Afghan territory pose an active security threat, is a legitimate sovereign concern, and nothing in international law obliges Pakistan to keep its borders open to nationals of a country it considers a security risk. That much sits comfortably alongside Denmark’s safety-reassessment argument, the Gulf’s sponsorship-conditionality argument, and Washington’s TPS-discretion argument: all four governments are exercising authority that plainly belongs to them.
The narrower objection, raised by Amnesty International and the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, is that the PMDC order reached students who were legally admitted and already partway through their training, some close to graduation, and expelled them retroactively by nationality rather than through individualised assessment, a concern sharpened for female students who may have no realistic path to resume medical training elsewhere. That is the same category of objection raised in all three other cases: not a challenge to the underlying sovereign authority, but a question about whether a blanket, nationality-wide action satisfies the individual-review standard the law is generally understood to require.
Where these arguments actually go wrong
Across all four cases, the pattern is identical. The state correctly notes it has the sovereign authority to expel foreign nationals. Critics correctly note that authority is conditioned on lawful process, individualised review where feasible, and non-discriminatory application. Both statements are true at the same time, which is exactly why “you have no right to tell us how to manage our borders” and “this is a human rights violation” talk past each other rather than engage. The Danish government was legally entitled to reassess asylum status. It was also legally required to do so on a sound factual basis with real recourse, and independent experts said it hadn’t. Pakistan is legally entitled to bar Afghan nationals from its medical schools going forward. Whether it can retroactively void the enrolment of students already admitted, without individual review, by nationality alone, is the actual legal question, not a settled one in Pakistan’s favour just because the Foreigners Act exists.
The states on the receiving end of criticism in these cases have a genuine interest in reframing the dispute as sovereignty versus foreign meddling, because that framing is much easier to win than the process argument underneath it. It is also the wrong argument, and reaching for it, rather than defending the actual process used, is usually a sign the process itself won’t survive scrutiny. The more durable response, and the one that actually protects a state’s freedom of action over time, is to build the individualised review and documented rationale that Article 13 asks for in the first place, since that is the version of “sovereignty” no human rights body has ever successfully challenged.
