Almost 700 Afghan asylum seekers in Belgium see asylum request rejected
Only 28 percent of asylum applications in Belgium was approved in March, compared to 44 percent in February. The reason for this sudden drop is linked to Afghanistan: alomst 700 Afghans saw their request to be granted a protected status in Belgium denied: "There is no more arbitrary violence."
About 1,900 applications were refused last month. About one third of the refugees that got bad news (680), are Afghans. After the taliban takeover in Afghanistan last year, the body that judges the applications - the Office for the Commissioner-General for Refugees and Stateless Persons or CGVS - establised new criteria for Afghan people fleeing their country. This took a while, which caused a backlog in the number of Afghan applications being treated.
Last month, the more stringent criteria triggered a major number of refusals. Dirk Van Den Bulck of the CGVS: "We analysed the safety situation in Afghanistan over the past months. There is still violence, but no longer random or arbitrary violence. Not everybody is being targeted by the taliban, only certain categories of people."
From August to March, only the files of people who were directly threatened or who risked being tortured were treated: human rights activists, journalists, those who worked for the previous regime (and who had clear link with the western world), and people with 'different' sexual preferences. The files of the others were postponed and only treated last March, with most getting a negative answer. This causes an uncommon low in the statistics, but this dip is only temporary, says Dirk Van Den Bulck.
Afgan asylum seekers that saw their request rejected, can appeal against the decision.