Europe reaches out to Afghan women persecuted by the Taliban
Afghan women demonstrate against the ban on access to universities for women on December 22 in Kabul.
REUTERS - STRINGER
Text by: Vincent Souriau
4 mins
In its latest recommendation to the Member States of the Twenty-Seven, the European Union Agency for Asylum considers that the mere fact of being an Afghan woman should make it possible to obtain refugee status.
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Since August 2021, they have been living in seclusion, driven out of public space by the new authorities in Afghanistan, who deprive them of the right to education, prevent them from working and moving freely.
This is too much for the European Union Agency for Asylum (AUEA).
This institution, which coordinates the protection of migrants in Europe, believes that the discrimination imposed on Afghan women reaches a threshold serious enough to qualify as persecution.
"
Today, being a woman in Afghanistan means facing restrictive measures put in place by the Taliban, in terms of freedom of expression, movement, access to work, access to education or care
, insists AUEA spokesman Andrew McKinlay.
These persecutions must give them access to refugee status.
»
The European services reached this unprecedented conclusion in their latest guidance note,
made public on January 25, 2023
, which lists the specific profiles targeted by the Islamist insurgency.
Women occupy a central place, alongside human rights defenders, members of the previous government and Afghans who have supported NATO's military intervention in Afghanistan in one way or another.
A small revolution on paper
On paper, this guideline issued by the AUEA is a small revolution.
She suggests that any Afghan woman who knocks on Europe's doors will automatically be granted refugee status.
In practice, this will not be the case, because the European international protection regime rests on two intangible pillars.
On the one hand, it is always the Member States who decide in the last resort.
Should we, yes or no, admit this person to our territory?
Each country of the Twenty-Seven decides in a sovereign way, and even if, in the future, this or that European capital rejects the request for an Afghan woman, Europe will not have a say.
On the other hand, it is an eminently individual process.
Each European State conducts, through its national authorities, in-depth interviews with asylum seekers, who must justify the atrocities they have suffered, and it is only after a personalized examination of their file that a decision is made.
Nevertheless, since last year, the recommendations of the European Agency have legal value.
Take the example of an Afghan woman whose asylum application is rejected by the French authorities and who appeals to the courts: in this case, the French judges have the obligation to check whether France has taken into consideration the analysis of the European authorities on the subject of Afghanistan, failing which, Paris must justify it, without risking sanctions.
Harmonize European practices
This mechanism has the primary ambition of harmonizing European practices, so that asylum seekers are treated in the same way everywhere in Europe, regardless of the country where they start their procedures.
And even if we cannot speak of a binding nature, the opinion of the AUEA produced its first effects: after Sweden, the Danish Commission for Refugees announced that it was going to grant, on the sole criterion of gender, a residence permit
for all Afghan women who request
it, but also to re-examine all the files of women or girls rejected by Denmark since the fall of Kabul.
With a few nuances, it is the same on the French side, where the protection rate granted to Afghan women by Ofpra, the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, has already reached more than 95%, recalls its director general, Julien Boucher.
"
We were very attentive to the specific situation of women and very quickly, we developed a practice of protection which consists in considering that, in general, women have fears in the event of a return to Afghanistan and therefore fall under refugee status,
he explains
.
This has really been our position from the start, so these guidelines come, as far as we are concerned, to reinforce a protection practice that has already been ours since mid-2021.
»
The most difficult thing for these women is to get out of Afghanistan.
If they succeed, Europe seems determined to unite and open its doors to them.
And there is work, because according to the latest figures available, nearly 15,000 asylum applications were filed in the European Union by Afghan nationals during the month of November 2022 alone.
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