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Germany said it had resumed airlifting Afghan criminals home on Friday (August 30), days before immigration became a campaign issue in the country’s local elections.
After the Taliban came to power in 2021, Berlin stopped repatriating people to Afghanistan over human rights concerns.
Pressure has been growing on the coalition government to reverse its moratorium following a deadly Islamic State-linked stabbing at a festival in the city a week ago and a knife attack in June in which an Afghan man killed a German police officer.
Germany’s government on Thursday rolled out a series of measures to tighten asylum policies and speed up deportations as it keeps an eye on Sunday’s elections in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party leads in opinion polls on the strength of its anti-immigration stance.
Secret talks mediated by Qatar
Der Spiegel magazine was first to report that a flight to Kabul took off from Leipzig early Friday morning with 28 convicted criminals on board after months of secret negotiations with mediator Qatar.
“I have announced that we will also send criminals back to Afghanistan. We have carefully prepared for this but have not spoken much about it,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a news conference at a mine in Saxony state on Friday.
German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck told Reuters that Germany’s asylum rights must remain unchanged.
In a statement, the government thanked “key regional partners” for their support, but did not name them, and said it was working on more deportations.
Qatar’s flagship Al Jazeera television station cited a Qatari Foreign Ministry official early Saturday as saying Doha had brokered talks between Germany and the Afghan Taliban to help Afghans return to their country under their legal status.
Sources said Qatar’s participation was based on a request from Germany, which the Taliban accepted.
“Doha’s efforts are part of its role to facilitate communication between the Afghan government and the international community,” Al Jazeera quoted a source as saying.
Direct negotiations with the Taliban are problematic because some of their officials are under international sanctions.
ProAsyl, a German NGO that provides legal and practical assistance to asylum seekers, said Friday’s deportations could be part of an irresponsible normalization of the Taliban regime.
“This is a declaration of bankruptcy for the constitutional state,” Tareq Alaows, a spokesman for refugee policy at ProAsyl, said in a statement.
A German Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Friday that the German government will not restore normal relations with the Taliban and that deportations are not a step towards that goal.
In addition to Afghanistan, Berlin is also working to deport individuals who have committed serious crimes or are considered a terrorist threat to Syria.
Germany also has a ban on deporting refugees to Syria, but in July a court in the western German city of Münster ruled that asylum seekers from Syria were no longer at risk of civil war.
In the first seven months of 2024, the number of asylum seekers in Germany fell by 19.7% compared with the previous year to 140,783 applications, with the largest groups of applicants coming from Syria, with 44,191 applications, and Afghanistan, with 22,698 applications.
In 2018, Germany’s interior minister said he had deported 69 Afghans on his 69th birthday, after which some public opinion in Germany turned against deportations. One of the Afghan refugees, a 23-year-old, committed suicide after arriving in Kabul.
Read more by Euractiv
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