The EU Commission on Monday refused to respond if any of its own delegation would include female staffers in order to conform with male-only events – as per Taliban tradition.
Nikolaj Nielsen
The Taliban will be arriving to Brussels in the next few days to meet with European Commission counterparts eager to deport Afghan nationals.
The pending arrival was confirmed to EUobserver on Monday (22 June) by Audrey Jacquiez, a spokesperson for Belgium’s deputy prime minister.
“We don’t know when they will arrive but it’s a question of days,” she said.
Jacquiez said five visas were issued last week. The visas would be valid for an “extremely short” time. Asked if this meant several days, she said “not even”.
The commission has been courting the Taliban for months, dispatching the deputy head of its home affairs department, Johannes Luchner, to Kabul in January.
Luchner said that while the intent is to return criminals, he also inferred that others could follow.
“Our first interest is the return of criminals, but we also have an increasing number of non-criminal Afghans with a return order,” he told European lawmakers in late January.
Luchner told MEPs he had travelled to the country earlier that same month.
But in a sign of the political sensitivities over the issue, his boss Beate Gminder has since told EUobserver, in a document access request, that the commission has no records of Luchner ever meeting the Taliban or even going to Afghanistan.
