European Union justice and home affairs ministers are meeting Tuesday to discuss the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan and the flow of refugees and migrants it is expected to produce.
The meeting comes the day after the last U.S. forces flew out of Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport, ending America's longest war.
The 27-nation bloc is looking for ways to prevent a repeat of a 2015 refugee crisis fueled by Syria's civil war. The arrival in Europe of well over a million migrants that year led to infighting among EU member nations over how best to manage the influx. A new wave of migrants from Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate tensions.
The EU is likely to provide funding to house refugees in countries bordering Afghanistan to prevent them from heading for Europe.
"It’s important that we are in a position where we can avoid a humanitarian crisis, migratory crisis and a security threat from Afghanistan," European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson said before the ministers' meeting.
"But then we need to act now and not wait until we have big flows of people at our external borders or until we have terrorist organizations being stronger,” she added. "So that’s why we need to act now to support people in Afghanistan, in the neighboring countries, and work together with international organizations.”
The EU's focus on accommodating migrants close to Afghanistan will not please rights groups. Amnesty International said in a letter to Johansson that the EU and its member nations "must refrain from extremely damaging responses that put emphasis on keeping the EU’s border ‘protected’ and proposing or adopting measures that shift the responsibility for the protection of refugees to third countries.”
The human rights group said the EU should give Afghans who reach Europe "access to the territory and to fair and effective asylum procedures and adequate reception conditions” and also consider all Afghan women and girls as "prima facie refugees” due to the risks they would face in Afghanistan.
American forces helped evacuate over 120,000 U.S. citizens, foreigners and Afghans after the Taliban regained control of the country, according to the White House. Coalition forces also evacuated their citizens and Afghans. But foreign nations and the U.S. government acknowledged they didn’t evacuate all who wanted to go.
According to some EU estimates, around 570,000 Afghans have applied for asylum in Europe since 2015. Asylum applications by Afghan nationals have climbed by a third since February as it became clear that the United States would pull troops out of Afghanistan. More than 4,648 applications were recorded in May, according to the EU’s asylum office. About half of the applications tend to be successful.
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