Nearly five years after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, one issue should be beyond dispute: Afghanistan is not safe for anyone forcibly returned there. Governments are fully aware of this but are still moving toward migration deals and engagement with the Taliban leadership that could send Afghans back into the Taliban nightmare.
Forcing people back to Afghanistan exposes them to a genuine risk of persecution and dire economic circumstances, while bolstering the global standing of the Taliban authorities who are responsible for crimes against humanity.
Afghanistan today is one of the world’s worst human rights crises — and for women and girls, it is a uniquely devastating one. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls are banned from education beyond sixth grade. Women have been pushed out of public life and face severe restrictions in employment. Anyone deemed dissenting from Taliban rule, regardless of their gender, lives under the constant threat of arbitrary detention and torture.
What is most concerning is not only the brutality inside Afghanistan, but the growing willingness of governments to act as though these realities no longer carry consequences.
On June 22, European Union officials hosted a Taliban delegation in Brussels — for the first time since the 2021 Taliban takeover — to discuss migration and return policies. Germany has already resumed deportations and allows Taliban officials to provide consular services in Berlin and Bonn. Officials in the United Kingdom have signaled that they may be prepared to negotiate with the Taliban over returns, as they watch similar debates unfold elsewhere in Europe.
Reports have surfaced that the U.S. has pressured people evacuated from Afghanistan and stranded in camps in Qatar to choose between forced returns or uncertain relocation elsewhere. The U.S. has already ended the temporary protected status of Afghans inside the country and halted the processing of other categories of protection for them.
The message: Return voluntarily, or we will deport you.
United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, and the U.N. special rapporteur on Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, have warned against deportations, stressing that returns would violate human rights law and breach the principle of nonrefoulement. The U.N. Refugee Agency said there are substantial obstacles to a “safe and dignified return” to the country.
That principle is simple and foundational: No one should be sent to a place where they face persecution, torture or other serious harm.
The near absence of robust and transparent human rights and humanitarian monitoring inside Afghanistan will also mean that returnees do not or cannot report the truth of their situation. At Human Rights Watch, we have documented cases in which forced returnees have been arbitrarily detained and tortured by the Taliban, as well as the abuses faced by women and girls every day.
A former security officer who had escaped to Pakistan and was then deported back to Afghanistan told me last year that upon his return, the Taliban detained and tortured him for two months.
He said that the Taliban “would cover their faces and beat me every night. Then, they would take me out of my cell, put me in a car and tell me that they were taking me to my ‘death place.’ For two months, every night, I expected to be killed.” He also said that the Taliban had detained and disappeared many of his colleagues. He’s currently living in hiding in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is not a safe country for returns. Governments cannot pretend that their deportation policy is separate from human rights policy. In fact, most Western governments continue to harshly criticize the Taliban’s human rights record in international forums.
Commendably, the EU led on the establishment by the U.N. Human Rights Council of an investigative mechanism tasked with collecting and preserving evidence of serious abuses in the country. Germany, Netherlands, Australia and Canada are pursuing an initiative to hold the Taliban accountable for their violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
But it’s the height of hypocrisy to condemn Taliban abuses in one breath and cooperate in sending people back to them in the next. Many of the governments now looking for ways to send Afghans back were deeply involved in Afghanistan for two decades. They cannot wash their hands of the debt of responsibility they owe to Afghans who worked with them or in projects they supported.
Migration deals will take the pressure off the Taliban for their ongoing abuses. This kind of “technical” engagement will send a dangerous message to every abusive government that no range of rights abuses and oppression will stop other countries from making deals with you, even at the expense of those most affected.
Other countries should not normalize engagement with the Taliban without clear and measurable human rights benchmarks. And they should not deport Afghans to a country where persecution is systematic and well documented. The EU, U.K.. U.S. and others considering this path should take stock of this harsh reality and act accordingly: no one should be sent to live in an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban.
