Munira, a 26-year-old transgender woman, has been living in a Pakistani shelter for LGBTQ+ people since 2023. She says that Germany rejected her asylum case without giving a credible reason in January 2025.
“When I received that email, I felt like the world had collapsed on me,” she tells Zan Times in a phone interview. “Why was my case rejected? Why wasn’t I found eligible, when as a trans woman in Afghanistan I’m denied even the most basic rights?” she asks. “If I go back, all that’s waiting for me is death.”
Germany approved Munira’s case in April 2023 and told her to make her own way to Pakistan. At the Kabul airport, a Taliban official checked her passport and asked another, laughing, whether they needed to verify “if he’s a man or not.” Her documents list her as male, which let her pass through Taliban checkpoints, but inside Afghanistan, she says, she spent two years locked in her home after Taliban fighters slapped and humiliated her on the street for “walking like a girl.” Since then, she has been waiting in Pakistan, living in a hotel whose supporting organization has warned that its funding may soon end.
While Munira and others who were promised protection from the Taliban are left stranded outside Europe, the European Union is hosting a Taliban delegation in Brussels. On Tuesday, European Commission officials met the Taliban for what they call “technical talks” about deporting Afghans whose asylum cases have been rejected. The Taliban don’t hide their satisfaction at the meeting.
“This was a historic visit as the first time ever that a delegation from Islamic Emirate visited the EU and held talks with member states in Brussels,” Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesperson for the Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs who led the delegation of five figures, said to the media.
The European Commission insists the meeting does not amount to recognizing the Taliban. Human rights groups reject that distinction. Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office called any EU engagement on deportations to Afghanistan “reckless, dangerous,” and a breach of the bloc’s own obligation not to return people to danger. Human Rights Watch’s Afghanistan researcher Fereshta Abbasi said, “EU countries are undermining their credibility by condemning Taliban abuses and pursuing accountability on one hand, while cooperating with the Taliban to forcibly return Afghans on the other. Any engagement with the Taliban needs to prioritize protecting human rights and accountability — not deporting people to danger.” Several members of the European Parliament called the move a betrayal of the EU’s own values.
Rejections like Munira’s began rising after an Afghan asylum seeker killed a police officer in Mannheim in May 2024, and intensified after a deadly knife attack by another asylum seeker on children in Aschaffenburg in January 2025. Migration became a defining issue in Germany’s February 2025 election, and human rights groups began reporting that asylum cases already under review were being rejected more frequently, with little regard for consequences.
Germany has since launched what Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt calls a “repatriation offensive,” a policy aimed at increasing deportations. On June 16, 2026, Germany deported 32 Afghan men convicted of crimes including homicide and drug trafficking on a charter flight to Kabul. Berlin is now negotiating on letting more Taliban consular officials into Germany to speed up deportation paperwork — which would be formal contact with a government it still refuses to recognize. “Three charter flights per month are possible in future,” a spokesperson for the German interior ministry told dpa. “In addition, individual repatriations using commercial flights are possible at all times,” the spokesperson added.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian pathways that brought Munira and others to Pakistan, in hope of resettlement to Germany — the human rights list known as MRL, and the wider federal admission program known as BAP — have been suspended, though not yet cancelled. In July 2025, Reuters reported that roughly 2,400 already-accepted Afghans were waiting to come to Germany, with NGOs estimating up to 17,000 more in earlier stages. Yet, Germany has no timeline on when it will resume the process.
To understand the breadth of the problems facing Afghan refugees wanting asylum in Germany, we spoke with families who were arrested by Pakistani police and deported to Afghanistan, with LGBTQ+ individuals, those who worked with German organizations, and a German lawyer who advocates for Afghans waiting to come to Germany. Although most refugees still live in Germany-supported guest houses in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they say danger threatens their lives from every direction.
Royan is a 20-year-old gay man who says he hides his identity even from his own family. He arrived in Pakistan in late 2024 after receiving an invitation from the German Humaitrain program. After Germany’s 2025 election, his case was rejected with no interview or explanation.
He now lives under the protection of an LGBTQ+ support organization, but says it has repeatedly warned him its support could end soon, telling him no country is currently willing to grant people like him asylum.
“Right now I live like a prisoner in this hotel,” he says. “I’m not even allowed to look outside through the window. I have no right to walk on the balcony. The moment I step out of my room to breathe some fresh air, the neighbors complain, and I’m forced to go back inside.”
He describes being unable even to dry his laundry outdoors: “When I wash my clothes and want to hang them on the balcony, they don’t let us stand within two metres of the balcony wall, in case the neighbors are bothered by seeing me. I call this hotel a prison. I can’t see the sky from here, or outside. I’m always locked in one room.”
Leaving the building is no easier, he says. “The hotel manager won’t let us go out, and out of fear of the police, we’re forced to stay in the room anyway.” Besides, he knows how dangerous it is for him to go out. He says Pakistani police detained and robbed him two months ago, taking what little money he had and confiscating his phone until he paid a bribe. He is now too afraid to leave his room at all. In Afghanistan, he says, friends from an LGBTQ+ group to which he once belonged were arrested by the Taliban, and he fears they may have revealed his identity under torture.
Royan’s account is not isolated. Rina, 28, a former local employee of a German organization in Afghanistan, was rejected in December 2025 despite passing two embassy interviews.
Sumaya, 28, was arrested with her husband by Pakistani police in August 2025 and deported to Kabul within a day, despite having passed security screening for asylum in Germany. At the Kabul hotel where she and roughly 200 other deportees were placed, Taliban intelligence vehicles arrived in January 2026 after the group complained to German coordinators about their treatment. Taliban fighters photographed their documents, filmed interviews with the men, and left two guards permanently posted at the entrance. “We feel like we’re imprisoned,” Sumaya says. “They told us we have no right to leave except for illness.”
A German lawyer representing several of these cases, says Berlin bears full responsibility for the situation, and that an admission pledge can be withdrawn even after approval for instance over alleged forgery, or a claim that a person is no longer at risk. She believes the real decisions are being made by Germany’s interior ministry, not staff in the German Embassy in Islamabad.
What connects Munira, Royan, Rina, and Sumaya is not just rejection, but its timing: their cases went cold precisely as Berlin moved toward direct cooperation with the Taliban on deportations, and as Brussels prepared to sit across a table from the same regime they risked their lives to escape.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writers. Raha Malik is the pseudonym of a Zan Times fellow in Afghanistan. Khadija Haidary is Zan Times managing editor, now living in Tanzania. Atia Farazar is the pseudonym of a Zan Times journalist in Afghanistan who contributed reporting along with Naweed.
