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26-06-2026
BRUSSELS: EU officials are facing fierce criticism over plans to host the Taliban in Brussels on Tuesday, with rights campaigners and MEPs warning that the meeting risks normalizing a regime that has banned girls from school beyond the sixth grade and sought to erase women from public life, while its ranks include two leaders accused of crimes against humanity.
The Belgian foreign ministry said on Monday it had issued five single-day visas to a Taliban delegation to attend a meeting in Brussels. Sources told the Guardian the meeting was expected to take place on Tuesday.
The meeting comes weeks after the commission confirmed that it has been in talks with the Taliban since January to discuss how to scale up the deportation of Afghan migrants.
The willingness of EU officials to cooperate with the Taliban who in 2024 banned women from speaking or showing their faces outside their home contrasts sharply with the messaging of the European parliament, where MEPs have repeatedly backed resolutions condemning the regime, said the Socialist MEP Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar.
“I’m appalled,” he said. “It’s absolutely an outrage and a total loss of faith and the credibility of the European Union that it can hold such a double standard.”
Two senior Taliban leaders are subject to arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court, which has accused them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls. The EU has imposed sanctions on several individuals associated with the regime.
In May, a spokesperson for the European Commission said the meeting with the Taliban had been coordinated with Sweden after 20 member states had called for concrete pathways to deport Afghans without legal residence permits or who are deemed a security risk. The talks would be focused on how to return those who “pose a security threat” to the EU, said the spokesperson.
The rationale was rejected by Lopez Aguilar, who instead accused the EU of allowing the far right and its rhetoric around immigration to set the agenda. “We’re 450 million people all together. There’s no reason to panic when you talk about a certain number of migrants fleeing from despair or from a lack of opportunities. Let alone persecution, which is grounds for them to seek international protection,” he said. “Migration is not a threat, not even a crisis. It’s a constant fact of the history of mankind.”
Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, hundreds of thousands of Afghans have sought asylum in Europe. Across the continent, the lives they have carved out have become increasingly precarious as the discourse on migration hardens, with many EU member states seemingly ready to overlook the risks of carrying out deportations to a country in the grips of a humanitarian and human rights crisis.
About 40% of the population in Afghanistan is affected by hunger, according to the International Rescue Committee. The situation of women in the country is particularly precarious as they wrestle with systematic barriers to education, employment and health care.
Lisa Owen, the organization’s Afghanistan country director, said: “Deporting Afghans back to a country where almost half of the population cannot feed themselves is not a migration policy; it is a decision that could cost lives.”
The message was echoed in an open letter, in which 83 Afghan and international human rights groups expressed grave concerns about the EU’s intentions. “Afghanistan is currently one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman, and forced return would expose many to persecution, violence and severe deprivation of rights,” it noted. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
