Detained for 11 months, defended by a lawyer who is a member of the N-VA, then deported to Kabul: is Belgium a safe country for asylum seekers?
S.R, a young Afghan asylum seeker, came to Belgium one year ago and was retained for 11 months,first in the closed centre in Bruges, then in Steenokkerzeel since October 2016. When he arrived in Bruges, he got a lawyer. It happens that the latter is member of a local section of the NVA where he is deputy secretary, in charge of the logistics and the organisation.
S.R introduced several asylum requests. He also received several expulsion notifications. He refused some (the law allows one to do so) and others
were cancelled. However, S.R fulfills all the conditions to get asylum because he is from the province of Nangarhâr, in Surkh-Rōd district, a
part of Afghanistan recognized as « not safe ».
Hence, two aspects of this procedure may be questioned:
first, the objectivity of a lawyer belonging to a far right extreme party which tries by all means to put an end to migration flows towards Europe and in particular towards Belgium. When the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, belonging to the same party, declares that « this government wants to deport, not to regularize », we may wonder what is the good will of this lawyer to reach a positive end to the asylum request.
Secondly,how can one assess a place to be « safe » or « not safe », in a country at war for 15 years? Since the American invasion in 2001, Afghanistan hasn’t lived one month without bombings or terrorist attacks. In Kabul for example, although declared « safe », explosions of all kinds strike the city every week. For sure, some cities and villages are less directly exposed to all this, but the European Union, which has recently signed an agreement with Afghanistan to facilitate the deportation of 80.000 Afghan failed asylum seekers, keeps forgetting one thing: when an Afghan coming from these « safest » zones flees to Europe to then be sent back there, Talibans and other members of the Islamic state (more and more
present in this part of the world) will not hesitate for a minute to consider him as a traitor and execute him right away. Since August, S.R
has had a new lawyer but the damages were done. He was deported to Kabul on November 4, 2016. We haven’t heard from him since.
More deportations to Kaboul will follow. Belgium is not a safe place for Afghan asylum seekers.
