As conflict intensifies in Afghanistan, six EU member states have sent a letter to the European Commission, asking not to suspend deportations of Afghan migrants.
The governments of Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and Austria are asking the EU executive to plead with Kabul to maintain repatriations of Afghan migrants, despite a call from Afghanistan to suspend them.
The six countries call on the Commission to engage in an intensified dialogue with Afghan partners on all pressing migration issues, including swift and effective cooperation on returns.
Stopping returns sends the wrong signal and is likely to motivate even more Afghan citizens to leave their homes for the EU, they also say in the letter sent on 5 August.
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister disagrees in an interview with the newspaper Tagesspiegel, saying that there is no guarantee that the deportees will not fall into the hands of the Taliban.
The Taliban offensive seems to be complicating the deportation of Afghan nationals for the time being anyway. A senior EU official said that because the Afghan authorities had notified Brussels that Kabul was suspending its forced return operations for three months, there was little chance that deportations would continue.
And given the current situation, the official doesn’t expect forced return operations to actually take place.
The official also added that so far this year, 1,200 people had been sent back to Afghanistan from the EU, of which 1,000 were voluntary and 200 forced.
The Taliban launched a major offensive against Afghan forces in early May, as international forces began their final withdrawal from Afghanistan, scheduled to end in August.
Advancing at a rapid pace, the Taliban now control five of the nine provincial capitals in the north (six out of 34 in the whole country) and fighting is underway in the other four.
The Kabul government had called on European countries to stop deporting Afghan migrants for the next three months. Sweden and Finland suspended deportations to Afghanistan following the call in July.
Sammy Mahdi, Belgium’s state secretary for asylum and migration, wrote on Twitter that just because parts of a country are dangerous does not mean that every national of that country is automatically entitled to protection.
The Dutch Ministry of Justice said the Netherlands did not want to suspend deportations either, while assuring that developments in Afghanistan are being followed closely.
Afghans made up 10.6% of asylum seekers in the EU in 2020 (just over 44,000 out of some 416,600 applications), second only to Syrians (15.2%), according to the EU’s statistics agency Eurostat.
