By Welcoming a Taliban Delegation, the EU Throws Shade on Its Own Afghan Policy

Five men who answer to a national leadership that is wanted by an international court walked into Brussels on June 23 and sat down with European Union officials. Nobody in the room spoke of diplomatic recognition. Nobody needed to. The Taliban delegation — representing a government whose two top leaders face active ICC arrest warrants — had just been let in the front door of the bloc that spent five years denouncing its treatment of women. This same government presides over a collapse of basic services that is now starving its own children. The World Food Program warned on August 4 that conflict, unemployment, rising food prices, and disrupted supply chains are pushing humanitarian needs higher across Afghanistan, and that aid reductions have already shuttered health centers and cut off vulnerable children from critical nutrition services. Yet even as the humanitarian picture darkens, Brussels opened diplomatic doors to the men running the country. “Hosting Taliban delegations in Brussels risks granting the regime de facto legitimacy, regardless of the European Union’s official stance against formal political recognition,” a senior analyst at the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, Paolo Ganino, tells The New York Sun.Mr. Ganino warns that such meetings hand the group “valuable domestic and regional propaganda to claim international acceptance,” and could, over time, erode the bloc’s leverage to demand human rights reforms.Belgium issued five one-day visas to the delegation, clearing the way for the Taliban’s first meeting with EU officials on European soil since the group recaptured Kabul in August 2021.The Brussels meeting was, in fact, just the latest step on a longer-running track: A European Commission delegation had already traveled to Kabul in January for preliminary technical contacts on the same return-and-readmission issues.Officials from the European Commission and 15 member states took part, with Sweden co-chairing what a Commission spokesperson called a technical-level meeting with representatives of the de facto authorities of Afghanistan responsible for return and readmission.A spokesman for the Taliban’s foreign ministry, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, who led the delegation, called the visit “a historic visit as first time that a delegation from Islamic Emirate visited the EU and held talks with member states in Brussels.” He noted that the agenda covered a resumption of consular services for Afghans in Europe, along with trust-building measures and what he called a “dignified return process.”The backdrop makes the visit hard to explain away. Less than a year earlier, on July 8, 2025, the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and its chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, accusing them of ordering the crime against humanity of gender persecution. It was the first time an international court had built a case squarely around that charge. The Taliban dismissed the warrants as baseless, saying the group does not recognize the ICC’s authority.So, how does a bloc built on human rights justify sitting down with the men accused of erasing them?Rights Groups Sound the AlarmThe backlash from advocates and lawmakers was immediate, with critics arguing that Brussels had crossed a line it could not easily walk back from.“Any engagement with the Taliban needs to prioritize protecting human rights and accountability, not deporting people to danger there,” a researcher at Human Rights Watch, Fereshta Abbasi, says. She adds that European Union countries are undermining their own credibility by condemning Taliban abuses on one hand while cooperating with the Taliban to forcibly return Afghans on the other.A Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai, has said she was “deeply shaken” to learn that the European Union was in talks with the Taliban.The meeting “fails to address the underlying political crisis in Afghanistan,” the director of the Afghanistan program at the University of Notre Dame and a former Afghan consul general in Los Angeles, Aref Dostyar, tells the Sun. He describes the EU’s approach as one of tactical engagement that puts Brussels’ own interests ahead of the Afghan people’s.Mr. Dostyar stresses that “if the EU were to ask anyone, anywhere in Afghanistan, what they want today, I bet no one would ask them to deport other Afghans back from Europe.” The negotiations “create leverage for the Taliban; they gain more airtime, a broader platform, and credit for ‘performance’ that can overshadow their record on crucial issues like human rights and inclusive governance.”Mr. Dostyar says the myth that Afghanistan is now safe is crumbling, pointing to Pakistan’s declared conflict with the Taliban along the border, and he questions how Brussels can defend its policy morally when its own embassy in Kabul is well aware of ground-level conditions.Other analysts say the mere fact of the meeting — which was held outside the commission’s institutional premises with few scant details made public — was damaging by itself.“It does at minimum reflect a normalization in the approach to the Taliban regime,” even if it does not amount technically or legally to formal recognition, a senior director at the Counter Extremism Center, Hans-Jakob Schindler, tells the Sun.Mr. Schindler argues Brussels had leverage it failed to use: Europe sent Afghanistan 161 million euros in aid last year. He adds that organizing the talks in a third country “rather than in Brussels would have been preferable,” since the invitation to the EU capital “likely signals to the Taliban an over-eagerness to get to an agreement.”Inside the European Parliament, the unease crossed party lines. “Every meeting, every visa and every official photo sends a political signal,” a German member of the European Parliament with the Greens/EFA group, Hannah Neumann, tells the Sun. “The Taliban are not coming to Brussels for technical talks, they are seeking legitimacy.”Ms. Neumann argues the EU is rewarding the group with political legitimacy even as the benchmarks Brussels set for engagement in 2021 have “only gone from bad to worse.” She points to the Taliban’s failure to protect human rights, form an inclusive government or cut ties with terrorist groups. The president of the International Federation for Human Rights, Alexis Deswaef, says the meeting provides “a form of political legitimacy to an undemocratic regime that is responsible for gender-based persecution and other grave human rights violations under international law.”The European Parliament had already gone on record against the outreach. Weeks before the Brussels meeting, MEPs adopted a resolution by 480 to 5, with 83 abstentions, urging member states to maintain non-recognition of the Taliban and expressing regret over the planned talks, while condemning a newly adopted Taliban criminal procedure code they said further entrenched what the resolution called gender apartheid. Socialist MEP Cecilia Strada called the Brussels meeting “a shameful chapter for Europe.”A Migration Problem Brussels Can’t Solve AloneThe talks did not emerge out of nowhere: They are the product of years of mounting frustration over a deportation system that simply isn’t working.Only 29 percent of migrants ordered to leave the EU are actually returned, and for Afghans the numbers are even lower. Of more than 14,000 ordered to leave in the first nine months of last year, just 340 were sent back according to Eurostat figures. More than 3,300 Afghans crossed into the bloc irregularly in the first four months of 2026, and over 63,000 sought asylum across Europe last year alone.The EU migration chief, Magnus Brunner, has defended the outreach on those grounds, arguing Brussels had no real alternative but to talk directly with the Taliban about returning Afghans who entered the bloc irregularly.The Belgian foreign minister, Maxime Prévot, tried to draw a careful line, saying Belgium doesn’t recognize the Taliban but would comply with EU requests to grant the visas. A Commission spokesman, Markus Lammert, told reporters the contacts were requested by a clear majority of the 27 EU member states — 19 of whom, along with non-member Norway, signed a letter in October calling for stronger migration policies, including a ramp-up of deportations.“These are technical-level contacts,” he said. “This does not mean recognition.”Not everyone is convinced Brussels can have it both ways.“The Taliban will view it as a diplomatic victory and a boost to its international legitimacy,” a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aaron Zelin, tells the Sun, adding the talks “should have been done in Doha instead.”On whether deported Afghans face real danger back home, Mr. Zelin says it depends heavily on their history: Those previously affiliated with the fallen Afghan republic could face treatment that is “quite harsh.” He underscores that deeper engagement is nothing new, since the Taliban have been meeting with European governments at Doha and Kabul for years; this is simply the first time it happened on European ground.Mr. Schindler says that the risk to returnees cuts both ways. Female deportees face what he calls “the abhorrent violation of basic women’s and girls’ rights in Afghanistan,” which he believes makes their extradition from an EU court all but impossible under the principle of non-refoulement.Far more delicate, he emphasizes, are Afghans convicted of terrorism or violent extremism, since the Taliban regime “will not see these individuals as criminals but as potential allies.” But sending back people with knowledge of European law enforcement tactics to a government that still shelters al-Qaida affiliates carries its own security risk.Brussels insists it can hold two positions at once: condemning the Taliban’s treatment of women while quietly negotiating with the men enforcing it. Whether that balancing act survives contact with its own arrest warrants is a question Europe has now put off for another day.Yet, as Ms. Yousafzai put it, any engagement with Kabul’s rulers must “begin and end with the rights of Afghan women and girls.”

By Welcoming a Taliban Delegation, the EU Throws Shade on Its Own Afghan Policy

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