Hannah Neumann, a member of the European Parliament, described the European Commission’s meeting with the Taliban administration delegation in Brussels as “political normalization without accountability,” stating that such a meeting should never have taken place. She emphasized that there is no such thing as “technical engagement” with the Taliban, and their presence in Europe’s capital carries clear political implications.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday (July 14), Neumann wrote on her X profile that the European Commission must transparently explain who is planned to be returned to Afghanistan and how Afghan residents in Europe will be protected from what she called “transnational repression.” She also questioned what the Taliban administration expects in return for this cooperation.<\/p>\n
According to her, although the European Commission insists that the discussions are solely about deporting “convicted terrorists, murderers, and rapists,” reports from Germany indicate that officials there are preparing to deport several Afghans with no criminal convictions.<\/p>\n
The MEP added that another contradiction appears in the Commission’s stance: on the one hand, the Brussels meeting is described as “technical engagement,” but on the other, the Taliban administration is seeking to control consular services in European countries \u2014 a move critics believe could expand the group’s political influence outside Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
In early July, the European Commission hosted a five-member Taliban delegation in Brussels. The declared purpose of the meeting was to discuss technical issues related to the deportation of “criminal migrants” from EU member states to Afghanistan. However, the Taliban stated that activating their consular services in Europe was also part of the negotiations, raising concerns about the process of normalizing relations with the group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
EU lawmaker Hannah Neumann criticizes Brussels meeting with Taliban, warning against political normalization and unclear deportation plans for Afghan migrants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-international","category-secondary-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}