Sharing the press release from the Afghan Refugees Collective
Last January 2026, the director of the Immigration Office, Freddy Roosemont, travelled to Kabul1 to negotiate the enforced return of Afghan nationals whom Belgium refuses to grant residence permits.
This ‘mission’ was orchestrated by the European Commission. Previously (in October 2025), the minister for asylum and migration, Anneleen Van Bossuyt, had led an initiative to send a letter to the European Commission encouraging the implementation of a ‘return’ policy targeting Afghan nationals2. The Belgian state therefore plays a decisive role in this European endeavour, since the impulse came from Belgium. Nineteen other European states subsequently joined the letter: unsurprisingly, the majority of these governments are dominated by the far right.
It has now been several years since the Taliban returned to power in 2021 that deportations to Afghanistan have no longer taken place from Belgium. According to minister Van Bossuyt, cooperation with the Taliban regime would be ‘purely technical’, and the most important thing would be to ‘protect the safety of our citizens, and for that, returning to Afghanistan is absolutely necessary’.3
Once again, we see the criminalising discourse at work, directed at people whom the state has deprived of residence permits. Such discourse is used as an argument to legitimise political choices that, in another context, might be perceived as inconceivable by public opinion. Detention and deportation in the name of security is a lie. It is the dehumanising and extremely precarious living conditions which people are subjects to that generate ‘insecurity’ (first and foremost for these people themselves). And yet, Van Bossuyt even goes so far as to hypocritically claim that this policy is being pursued ‘primarily in their own interest’4.
The urgency to act on this non-existent problem is also a fiction. Van Bossuyt reports that there are currently 2,635 people of Afghan origin in open centres: however, this represents only about 0.02% of the total Belgian population. As has become common in far-right discourse, people are turned into numbers, and these numbers are manipulated to generate fear.
By allowing deportations to Afghanistan, Belgium is exposing people to grave danger, in addition to tearing families apart. We are sharing here the press release from the Afghan Refugee Collectives, which denounces this deportation policy and the normalisation of diplomatic relations with the ruling regime. We join them in their demands.
NO TO DEPORTATIONS
TO AFGHANISTAN AND ANYWHERE ELSE
The Afghan Refugees Collective, the Afghan community in Belgium, strongly condemn the position of the Belgian Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, supported unreservedly by all the parties in the so-called ‘Arizona ’ coalition, which aims to organise or legitimise the deportation of Afghan nationals to their country of origin, but also to normalise diplomatic relations with the ruling regime. This political stance constitutes a serious moral failing, a reneging on Belgium’s international commitments and a frontal attack on the most basic principles of human rights protection.
Afghanistan is not a ‘safe country’. This is a reality that no politician can ignore. Since the Taliban took power, the country has been plunged into a regime of terror marked by systematic violations of fundamental rights: extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, forced marriages, political persecution, repression of ethnic and religious minorities but also of men who worked alongside foreign soldiers, national army soldiers, NATO and American soldiers, workers in organisations, national and international journalists, as well as the systematic destruction of the rights of women and girls, who are excluded from public life, education and work. Added to this is a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, marked by extreme poverty, food insecurity and a total lack of legal protection. In this context, deporting Afghan people amounts to knowingly exposing them to serious, even fatal, risks. This is a clear violation of the principle of non-refoulement, the cornerstone of the right to asylum and enshrined in the Geneva Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights and many other texts that Belgium has freely ratified. By claiming to respect the law while organising these deportations, the government is displaying appalling hypocrisy.
This responsibility cannot be diluted. By supporting this policy, the parties of the Arizona coalition are collectively choosing to sacrifice human lives on the altar of political calculation, security one-upmanship and the stigmatisation of migrants. They are contributing to the trivialisation of a dehumanising discourse that turns women, men and children into mere ‘files’ or electoral adjustment variables.
We reject this shameful policy of Belgium, which is well known in current history. We refuse to allow Belgium, which claims to defend human rights on the international stage, to become complicit in persecution by sending people back to a regime that oppresses them. We refuse to allow the right to asylum to be emptied of its substance in the name of a logic of closure, fear and exclusion.
We demand an immediate halt to all deportations to Afghanistan, full recognition of the dangerous situation in which Afghan nationals find themselves, and an asylum policy based on protection, dignity and solidarity. We call on civil society, associations, trade unions and all progressive forces to mobilise against these unjust and inhumane decisions.
Indeed, to send someone back to Afghanistan today is to condemn them to death.
Collectif des Réfugiés Afghans (Afghan Refugees Collective), La Coordination des sans-papiers de Belgique (Belgian Undocumented Migrants Coordination).
Sources :
1 https://www.rtbf.be/article/la-belgique-negocie-avec-les-talibans-pour-renvoyer-des-afghans-dans-leur-pays-11667282
https://emnbelgium.be/fr/nouvelles/anneleen-van-bossuyt-confirme-la-participation-de-la-belgique-une-mission-administrative
