“Afghan citizens who commit crimes in other countries are, of course, personally responsible for their actions, but they also represent the Afghan nation,” said Qani. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, he added, the deportees are dealt with by the Afghan interior ministry “according to Sharia law.”
Human rights groups and the United Nations have sharply criticized Germany for the deportation plans. “Sending people back to a country in which they are at risk of persecution, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or other irreparable harm, violates the core international law principle of ‘non-refoulement,’” a U.N. spokesperson said in July.
But some advocates say there are dangers for Afghan dissidents more broadly now that the Taliban have established a foothold in Germany’s Afghan consulates.
“It is very dangerous,” Hamid Nangialay Kabiri, who served as the head of the Afghan consulate in Bonn from 2019 until this September, told POLITICO. Kabiri, who resigned with the consulate’s entire staff in protest at the arrival of a Taliban official, said the office is of special interest to the Taliban regime because the biometric data of Afghan citizens residing in over 20 countries is stored there as well as personal information on people evacuated through resettlement and humanitarian programs in Europe, Canada and the United States.
By accessing this data, the Taliban can find information about where opponents of the regime reside, including information about their families still in Afghanistan, according to Kabiri.
When asked about concerns over Taliban access to those records, the German foreign ministry responded to POLITICO with a written statement. “The German government has an interest in ensuring that the Afghan diplomatic missions in Germany remain operational and that Afghan nationals in Germany receive adequate consular services, including the issuance of travel documents.”
Taliban officials, meanwhile, are pressing ahead with their takeover of diplomatic missions in Germany. In Berlin, the officials plan to soon raise the white and black flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, reinstated by the Taliban when they came to power four years ago.