Hyphen: European Union Has Failed to Protect Afghan Women
- Zan News
- Jun 30
- 3 min read
The British media outlet Hyphen has reported in a recent article that nearly four years after the Taliban’s return to power, the European Union has failed to fulfill its promises to protect and provide asylum for Afghan women.
The report, published on Monday (30 June), includes interviews with four Afghan women now living in various European countries. Their experiences reveal a painful journey through difficult asylum processes, uncertainty, sexual harassment, poverty, and neglect of their basic needs.
One of these women, Zainab, an art teacher from Kabul, said she lost her job at a school and a beauty salon after the Taliban took control of the city and was confined to her home for months. In late 2023, she went to Iran to apply for a humanitarian visa. Amid nationwide protests in Iran and with limited financial resources, she lived in fear of deportation for weeks.
After eight months of waiting, she finally received her visa in June 2024 and arrived alone in France. Zainab now lives in the suburbs of Paris and receives only 200 euros per month. She says, “It is impossible to survive on this money.”
Due to her lack of French language skills, she struggles with complex asylum systems and social services in isolation. “Once, I waited in line for food aid for six hours, but when I asked if the food was halal, they yelled at me.”
Homeira, a women’s rights activist, was stuck in Pakistan before reaching Spain with a humanitarian visa. She says that during her first months in a refugee shelter in Madrid, she was sexually harassed. According to her, the response from support institutions destroyed her hope of finding safety in Europe.
“When I shared the incident with social workers, they dismissed it as a cultural misunderstanding and said, ‘This is Europe, not Afghanistan.’” She received a single counseling session, which she found helpful, but she still struggles with the trauma.
Roya, a 22-year-old from Kabul, is a survivor of the 2022 suicide bombing at the Kaj education center, which killed 53 students. After six months of medical treatment in Islamabad, she traveled to Madrid in March 2023 with a humanitarian visa.
Although she thought she had reached safety, she says, “The hardest part of the journey was just beginning” — from uncertainty and long waits to confusion in the asylum system.
In September 2024, Roya received an email stating that her application to reunite with her elderly parents and two younger siblings had been accepted. But months later, the request was inexplicably denied. She says the situation has caused her deep anxiety and psychological distress.
Parasto, a human rights lawyer from Ghazni, was evacuated from Kabul Airport in 2021 and ended up in Warsaw, Poland, via a military flight instead of being relocated to the United States. She spent five months in a refugee camp before local Polish women helped her contact a law office and eventually secure residency.
Sahar Fetrat, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “Many Afghan women are forced to undertake dangerous journeys with their children, crossing multiple borders while facing harassment, intimidation, violence, and unlawful deportations.”
She added, “The lack of safe and legal pathways has left many of these women arriving in Europe with severe psychological trauma. They need immediate mental health support, but such services are often not accessible to them because they are still waiting for their asylum applications to be processed.”
This comes despite a December 2021 pledge from 15 European Union member states to resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees in response to the worsening human rights situation in Afghanistan. The program was designed to provide long-term protection to those unable to return to their country. In October 2024, the European Court of Justice also ruled that every Afghan woman fleeing the Taliban “has sufficient grounds to be granted asylum.”
However, human rights groups have warned that in practice, no clear and legal safe routes have yet been established for these women.
Meanwhile, the European Union claimed that between 2021 and 2023, it had accepted 41,500 Afghans. But according to UNHCR data from August 2023, only 329 Afghan refugees had been formally resettled in four European countries, while the majority remain in limbo. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has described the situation as a “shocking neglect.”
