Islamabad High Court Stays Repatriation of Deputation Employees

By TaazaPulse News Desk · Published: 30 October 2026 · TaazaPulse News Desk

The Islamabad High Court has stopped the federal government, for now, from sending back employees who have spent years working in federal departments on deputation. In a written order issued on Thursday 29 October 2026, Justice Inaam Ameen Minhas restrained the Establishment Division from issuing notifications to repatriate employees serving on deputation to their parent departments, and directed the petitioners to continue working in their current positions until the case is heard again.

The order, reported by Dawn on Friday 30 October and by The News the same day, came on a petition filed by Khalid Mahmood and others. It is an interim order, not a final judgment: the court has not decided whether the employees are entitled to regularisation, and it has not struck down any repatriation policy as a whole. What it has done is freeze the position while the government answers the case — no repatriation notifications from the Establishment Division in the meantime, and no sudden transfer of the petitioners back to the departments that originally lent them.

Alongside the restraint, the court issued a notice to the federal government and directed it to submit a report and para-wise comments within two weeks. A para-wise reply is the government's point-by-point answer to the petition: each factual claim and each legal ground in the petition is answered in turn, so that the court, at the next hearing, has both sides' versions of the same facts in front of it. Further proceedings have been adjourned until next month, which means the interim protection holds at least until the government has filed that reply and the court has had a chance to consider it.

The petitioners' case, as put by their counsel and reported in the press, rests on two arguments. The first is length of service: the employees have been serving in their respective departments for more than 15 years, and counsel argued that such a long period has given them a legal right to regularisation — in other words, to be absorbed permanently into the departments where they have actually worked, rather than returned to a parent department they left a decade and a half ago. The second argument is procedural: counsel argued that the notification directing their repatriation had been issued in violation of the principles of natural justice. Natural justice, in this context, is the basic fairness requirement that a person facing an adverse decision should be heard before it is taken, and should know the reasons for it. The court has not yet accepted either argument; it has given the government two weeks to answer them.

To understand why a stay of this kind matters, it helps to understand what deputation actually is. In Pakistan's civil service, deputation is a temporary posting: an employee who belongs to one department, the lending or parent department, is sent to work in another, the borrowing department, usually because the borrowing department needs a skill or a pair of hands it does not have in-house. The employee's substantive post remains in the parent department; the borrowing department gets the service, and the parent department, in theory, gets the employee back when the deputation ends. Repatriation is simply the return journey — the formal notification that sends the employee back to the parent department and ends the borrowing department's claim on their service.

The system is designed to be temporary, and the rules say so in plain terms. The Supreme Court of Pakistan, in a 2023 judgment later reported as 2024 SCMR 188, set out the framework: deputation is for exceptional circumstances where the borrowing department lacks expertise in the relevant field, the procedure in Rule 20-A of the Civil Servants (Appointment, Promotion and Transfer) Rules, 1973 must be followed, and deputation should not become an indefinite period of service. The normal period of deputation, the court noted, is three years, extendable by a further two years, with a maximum of five years under Serial No. 27(iv) of the ESTA Code, Volume-I — the Civil Establishment Code — after which both the borrowing and the lending organisation should ensure immediate repatriation. That five-year ceiling is the government's strongest general argument in cases of this kind: a posting that was meant to last three to five years cannot, on this view, harden into a permanent appointment simply because it was allowed to run on.

The petitioners' answer, in substance, is that the rules were not applied as written. If an employee has in fact served for more than 15 years in the borrowing department — three times the maximum deputation period — then, counsel argues, the position has changed: the employee's working life, family arrangements, seniority expectations and institutional knowledge are all rooted in the department where they actually serve, and a repatriation order issued after such a period, without a hearing, cannot be treated as a routine administrative step. That is the tension at the heart of this case, and it is a tension that recurs across the federal government: the rules describe a short, temporary loan of staff, while the practice, in case after case, has allowed deputations to run for far longer than the rules contemplate, until the return order itself becomes the dispute.

The history of deputation disputes in Pakistan shows how often that tension has reached the courts. In September 2016, the Supreme Court laid down a procedure for retaining officials on deputation and for their absorption into borrowing departments, with the consent of the lending department, and the court's registrar subsequently asked the federal government to review its deputation and transfer policy to bring it into conformity with that judgment. The court also provided an opportunity for eligible officers to compete, through the Federal Public Service Commission, for posts in the Office Management Group against a reserved quota — an attempt to give long-serving deputationists a lawful route to permanence rather than leaving them in indefinite limbo. Dawn's reporting at the time noted that the Establishment Division itself had officers who had overstayed the five-year maximum, and that audit objections had been raised over deputation allowances paid without approval — a reminder that the problem has never been confined to one department or one group of employees.

A Senate committee took up the same issue in 2018, when the Establishment Division told the Senate Standing Committee on Cabinet Secretariat that more than 180 officials were working in federal government departments on deputation, and that many of them had gone into litigation over overstaying their periods. The committee directed the division to furnish details of all officials on deputation and recommended that those who had completed their tenure be sent back to their parent departments — while also hearing concerns that most deputationists had no expertise in the posts they occupied, and that officers working under deputationists saw their own promotions affected. That parliamentary record matters for this case because it shows the other side of the argument in its own words: repatriation is not only about the individual employee, but about the promotion prospects of the cadre officers in the borrowing department and the parent department alike, and about whether a department's posts are being filled by the people the rules say should fill them.

This particular petition also has a recent procedural history that is worth recording separately from its merits. Earlier in October 2026, Justice Arbab Muhammad Tahir recused himself from hearing a deputation repatriation petition, after disclosing that the petitioners had allegedly attempted to approach him through telephone calls and recommendations. The judge said such approaches were inappropriate, observed that the petitioners' legal claims could still be considered on their merits, and directed that the case file be sent to the chief justice's office for reassignment. The stay order reported on Friday was issued by a different judge, Justice Inaam Ameen Minhas. The recusal does not decide anything about the petitioners' claims; it is a reminder of the procedural care the courts take when a case has already attracted controversy before it reaches a hearing on the merits, and it explains why the petition's progress has been watched closely in Islamabad's legal circles.

What, then, does Thursday's order actually change for the employees concerned? In the immediate term, three things. First, the Establishment Division cannot issue the repatriation notifications that the petition challenges, so the petitioners are not required to report back to their parent departments on the strength of those notifications. Second, the petitioners continue in their current positions, which means their day-to-day work, their reporting lines and their place in the borrowing departments remain as they were before the order. Third, the burden of the next step falls on the federal government: within two weeks it must file a report and a para-wise reply, setting out its version of the facts — how long each petitioner has served, under what notifications, and on what authority — and its legal answer to the regularisation and natural-justice arguments. Until that reply is filed and considered, the case remains open and undecided.

What the order does not do is equally important, and it is where reporting of interim orders most often goes wrong. It does not regularise anyone. It does not absorb the petitioners into the borrowing departments, and it does not grant them the status of permanent employees of those departments. It does not declare the repatriation notification unlawful, and it does not decide that 15 years of service, by itself, creates a legal right to regularisation — that is the petitioners' argument, which the government will now have the opportunity to answer. A stay is a holding measure: the court preserves the existing position because, in its preliminary view, sending the employees back now would make the petition itself meaningless by the time it is decided. If the government, in its reply, shows that the repatriation was lawful and properly ordered, the court can vacate the stay and the case can proceed on that footing. If the petitioners' arguments hold, the court can extend the protection or decide the petition in their favour. Neither outcome is pre-judged by Thursday's order.

The two-week deadline is therefore the next real date in this case, even though the next hearing is adjourned until next month. A para-wise reply from the federal government will reveal, for the first time in the public record of this case, the government's own account: whether it accepts the 15-year service claim, whether it relies on the five-year deputation ceiling and the Supreme Court's framework, whether it says the petitioners were heard before the notification, and whether it proposes any alternative — such as a fresh hearing, a competitive process, or a time-bound review — short of immediate repatriation. Readers following this story should watch for that reply, and for whether the court, at the next hearing, extends the stay, modifies it, or sets the petition down for a final hearing on the merits.

Beyond the individual petitioners, the case touches a structural question that the federal government has never fully resolved: what to do with employees whose deputation has, in practice, become permanent. The rules provide a clear answer — three years, extendable to five, then repatriation — but the practice has repeatedly produced something else: employees who serve for a decade or more in a borrowing department, build their careers there, and then face a return order to a parent department where their post, their seniority and their working relationships have all moved on. Each time such an order is challenged, the courts are asked to balance two legitimate concerns: the employee's expectation after years of service, and the system's need for a predictable, rule-bound transfer policy that does not quietly convert temporary postings into permanent appointments outside the competitive process. Thursday's order does not resolve that balance. It buys time for the government to explain, in a single case, how it proposes to strike it.

For other employees on deputation in federal departments, the order is therefore best read narrowly. It protects the petitioners in this case, on the facts as presented to Justice Minhas, until the government replies. It does not create a general rule that all long-serving deputationists are now regularised, and it does not stop the Establishment Division from acting in other cases. Employees in a similar position who are considering a petition will need their own facts — their own notifications, their own length of service, and their own record of whether they were heard — because service cases turn, more than most litigation, on the individual record rather than on a single headline order. That is also why the government's para-wise reply matters beyond this petition: it will set out, in writing, the framework the Establishment Division says it is applying, and that framework will be read by every other deputationist with a similar file.

TaazaPulse will follow this case at the next stage: the federal government's report and para-wise comments, due within two weeks, and the resumed hearing next month. If the government files its reply early, or if the court varies the stay before the next hearing, this story will be updated to record the change, with the new order reported on its own terms. For now, the position is clear and deliberately limited: the repatriation notifications are stayed, the petitioners stay in their current posts, and the government has two weeks to explain why, in its view, they should go back.

Note on sourcing: the court's order, the two-week deadline, the direction that petitioners continue in their current positions, and the petitioners' regularisation and natural-justice arguments are as reported by The News and Dawn on 30 October 2026. The general deputation framework (three years, extendable to five) is from the Supreme Court's 2023 judgment summarised above, and the 2016 and 2018 background is from Dawn's reporting of the time. No repatriation notification, government reply or final judgment in this case had been published at the time of writing.