Afghanistan<\/a> almost five years ago.<\/p>\nRecommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
A spokesperson from the Belgian Foreign Ministry told reporters that the five visas were granted on Monday after a security assessment and that they are valid for Belgium for one day only.<\/p>\n
The European Commission said it has invited the Taliban officials for discussions on irregular migration from Afghanistan to the 27-member bloc, and to also discuss the deportation of Afghan people in the EU who have had their asylum applications rejected.<\/p>\n
The EU has not identified which Taliban representatives were invited to the meeting. Several senior Taliban leaders are also under EU sanctions.<\/p>\n
\u201cMember States are looking into ways to return persons who have committed serious crimes and who are possibly a security threat. So this is the initiative that the Commission is now following up on,\u201d Commission spokesman Markus Lammert told the EU\u2019s daily news briefing on Monday.<\/p>\n
According to a letter seen by the Reuters news agency and addressed to Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a Taliban Foreign Ministry spokesman, the meeting will focus on \u201cthe return and readmission of Afghan nationals without a right to stay in the European Union\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Commission, however, emphasised that this meeting does not mean Brussels is formally recognising the Taliban.<\/p>\n
Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban have steadily curtailed rights, restricting women\u2019s freedom of movement, banning girls from education beyond primary school, and enforcing morality laws that limit free expression and access to employment. European governments also shut their embassies in Kabul when the Taliban authorities returned to power.<\/p>\n
Rights organisations have asked the Commission to abandon its plans to talk with the Taliban.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny engagement with the Taliban needs to prioritise protecting human rights and accountability \u2013 not deporting people to danger there,\u201d Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, the EU\u2019s migration chief Magnus Brunner defended the outreach, saying Brussels had no other option than to talk to the Taliban government about returning Afghan asylum seekers who had entered the 27-member bloc irregularly.<\/p>\n
European governments have sought a tougher stance on migration as public opinion has hardened, spurring far-right electoral gains across the continent.<\/p>\n
EU countries have received about a million asylum applications filed by Afghans between 2013 and 2024, according to the bloc\u2019s migration agency.<\/p>\n
Although Afghans are among the nationalities with the highest asylum recognition rates in the EU, overall acceptance has tightened as migration \u2060policies become more restrictive.<\/p>\n
About 20 of the EU\u2019s 27 member states expressed interest in returning numbers of migrants without a right to stay, particularly those with criminal convictions, to Afghanistan in a letter last year.<\/p>\n
EU law allows for deportations of people convicted of serious crimes or \u2060deemed security threats in certain cases, but returns to Afghanistan have been limited due to the lack of diplomatic relations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe focus for member states is very much on persons who have committed serious crimes or who pose a security threat,\u201d Commission spokesman Lammert told journalists Monday.<\/p>\n
Afghanistan is, however, currently mired in a deep humanitarian crisis. According to the United Nations World Food Programme, more than 17 million Afghans \u2013 or one-third of the population \u2013 are \u201cfood insecure\u201d, while the country is absorbing tens of thousands of people returning from Iran and Pakistan.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe desperate scenes of people \u2013 including EU staff \u2013 fleeing Afghanistan are a recent memory,\u201d Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International\u2019s European Institutions Office, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is unconscionable that the EU would now try and deport people to Afghanistan, which has only become more dangerous in the meantime,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Belgium has issued five visas to a Taliban delegation to attend a European Union meeting on migration in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[2532,740,7,18,69,996,144,9418],"class_list":["post-23416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-afghanistan","tag-asia","tag-belgium","tag-brussels","tag-europe","tag-migration","tag-news","tag-taliban"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116798199407528262","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23416","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=23416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}