✍ Op-ed: Marking Three Years Since the Taliban’s Takeover of Afghanistan: A Grim Reflection
🔵Tuesday 15 August was the third anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan – a day that shattered the hopes of millions and forced hundreds of thousands of Afghans (mostly highly educated) to flee their homeland.
🔵The situation in Afghanistan remains dire, with a devastating humanitarian crisis and the relentless erosion of human rights.
👉Women have been disproportionately targeted. Not only are they barred from education and public spaces, but a recent Taliban decree even forbids them from speaking loudly.
👉Iran and Pakistan, which together host approximately 90% of these Afghan refugees, often complain that they are left alone without adequate support from wealthy countries and criticise other states for the lack of third-country solutions for refugees living in their countries.
🔵Limited efforts on evacuation and admission of Afghans at risk to Europe.
👉Although a few EU MS continued to evacuate small numbers of Afghans and launched specific admission programmes, such as Italy’s humanitarian corridors, others, such as Austria, refused to participate in any evacuation efforts.
👉In February 2022, the Council of the EU (under the Common Foreign and Security Policy) adopted a decision emphasising the need to continue evacuating Afghans at risk until December 2022 – a deadline that has since been extended twice and is now December 2024. The Council decision should serve as a tool for EU MS to continue the evacuation of their former Afghan local staff and those Afghans whose lives are at risk inside Afghanistan.
👉 Many former local staff who worked with the EU and its MS, as well as other at-risk Afghans, remain in hiding within Afghanistan or in neighbouring countries, and living in constant fear and uncertainty.
👉 In the absence of regular and safe pathways, some Afghans have embarked on perilous journeys to reach Europe, where an asylum lottery awaits them, with divergences in EU MS decision-making on asylum matters, and some people denied access to a procedure or to European territory.
🔵The current situation in Afghanistan remains critical, necessitating a multifaceted approach from the EU and its MS. While long-term, sustainable solutions must be sought to ensure that all Afghans can one day live in peace and freedom, the EU’s immediate focus should also include the provision of life-saving assistance and the creation of safe pathways to protection for those at risk.
👉To advance these efforts, a practical next step would be for the EC to convene a follow-up high-level forum on resettlement and humanitarian admission in 2024. This forum should aim to mobilise EU MS to expand their commitments to admitting Afghans at risk. The EU could help to mitigate the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan and offer a beacon of hope to those who are most vulnerable and at risk.
🔗Read the full op-ed here: bit.ly/4cSNpXP