France Begins Technical Talks with Taliban on Deporting Afghan Migrants

DID Press: France has begun technical discussions with Taliban officials on returning Afghan migrants who do not have legal residency status, the country’s interior minister has announced.

Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, told parliament on Monday: “We are trying to make it possible to return some Afghans who are in an irregular residency situation. These are technical discussions.”

Referring to similar measures by other European countries, he added: “Other countries are doing this as well; Germany is also doing it.”

In early October, Agence France-Presse (AFP), citing a French diplomatic source, reported that Paris had begun talks with the Taliban government to “facilitate” the deportation of Afghan nationals to Afghanistan.

Although France does not recognize the Taliban government and has no formal diplomatic relations with it, it has joined around 20 other European Union member states, including Germany, Belgium and Sweden, in calling for faster returns of Afghan migrants, particularly those convicted by courts.

Nuñez said some of these individuals “may pose a threat to public order,” adding that his priority was to make their deportation possible.

Meanwhile, Léa Balage El Mariky, a representative of France’s Green Party, criticized the government’s move, describing it as the beginning of a process to normalize diplomatic relations with a government that, in her words, commits crimes against humanity through the imposition of what she called “gender apartheid.”