BRUSSELS, May 12 (Reuters) – The European Union is planning to invite officials from Afghanistan’s Taliban government to Brussels for \u200ctheir first known official visit, to discuss ways to deport \u200csome Afghan migrants back to Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
Western countries have declined to recognise the Taliban \u200bsince the Islamist fighters swept back to power in Afghanistan five years ago, overthrowing a government that had been backed by U.S. and NATO troops for two decades.<\/p>\n
An EU spokesperson said the planned Brussels meeting \u200cwas being set up \u2060in response to a request from several EU member states. No date had been set yet, and \u2060the meeting did not mean the EU had recognized the Taliban.<\/p>\n
The meeting appeared to be the first publicly announced visit by Taliban officials \u200bto Brussels, \u200balthough the spokesperson said he was \u200bnot able to confirm this.<\/p>\n
EU \u200cofficials had already travelled to Kabul for a meeting in January, the spokesperson said, and the EU was now working “on a potential follow-up meeting at technical level in Brussels with the de-facto authorities in Afghanistan to pursue these discussions”.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have \u200csought asylum in Europe since the \u200bTaliban takeover of the country. European law \u200ballows some migrants who \u200bcommit crimes or are considered a security threat to \u200cbe deported, but this has \u200bbeen difficult to \u200bcarry out with Afghanistan because of the lack of diplomatic relations.<\/p>\n
The EU spokesperson said Sweden was helping to coordinate the planned \u200bBrussels meeting. The \u200cSwedish government did not immediately reply to a request for \u200bcomment.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Amina IsmailAdditional reporting by Essi LehtoWriting by \u200bCharlotte Van CampenhoutEditing by Peter Graff)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BRUSSELS, May 12 (Reuters) – The European Union is planning to invite officials from Afghanistan’s Taliban government to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[2532,18,1941,1163,10223,3435],"class_list":["post-15271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-afghanistan","tag-brussels","tag-eu-member-states","tag-spokesperson","tag-taliban-government","tag-the-european-union"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116561200061804242","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}