Let us name it plainly. What is happening to Afghan women is a feminicide. And the European Union, by welcoming Taliban officials into the very capital of its institutions, has chosen migration management over moral clarity at the worst possible moment.

The European Commission confirmed this week that Taliban representatives met EU officials in Brussels following Belgium’s decision to grant the delegation one-day visas. The stated purpose was technical: discussion of the “dignified return” of failed Afghan asylum-seekers. The actual consequence is far more consequential — the quiet legitimization of a regime that has methodically destroyed the lives, freedoms, and futures of millions of women and girls.

From Doha to Brussels: A Pattern of Appeasement

This is not without precedent. In 2022, several EU leaders traveled to Qatar to negotiate with Taliban representatives, trading the rights of Afghan women for promises of “stability” and gas security. Today, the Taliban have not merely been invited to negotiate at a distance — they are standing in Brussels, in the headquarters of an institution that proclaims itself the global champion of human rights and gender equality.

The trajectory is unmistakable. Each engagement emboldens the Taliban’s calculus that international pressure is performative, temporary, and ultimately negotiable. Every visa granted, every meeting convened, and every communiqué issued telling the world that the returns process will be “dignified” is a message to Kabul: the world will eventually come to you on your terms.

A Glaring Double Standard

I have witnessed firsthand how the European Union wields trade and cooperation frameworks as instruments of human rights pressure. The EU’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus — GSP+ — is regularly invoked in negotiations with countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh as leverage for gender equality commitments, labour protections, and democratic governance.

And yet, in the same breath, Europe finds itself unable to guarantee even the most minimal security for young women and girls in Afghanistan — a country it claims to hold to account. It is useless to give lessons to Pakistan and Bangladesh on women’s rights and use GSP+ as a tool of pressure when we are simultaneously negotiating “dignified returns” with the very government that banned girls from school, expelled women from universities, forbade them from public spaces, and in effect erased them from civic life.

The Cost of “Creeping Normalization”

Migration policy experts have warned of what Helena Hahn of the European Policy Centre terms a “creeping normalization” — a gradual erosion of principled non-recognition driven not by changed facts on the ground, but by political pressures at home. Europe’s governments face electoral discomfort over irregular migration, and the Taliban offer an administrative convenience: a counterpart that can, at least in theory, receive deportees.

But administrative convenience is not a foundation for foreign policy. The EU Commission’s migration chief, Magnus Brunner, defended the engagement by arguing Europe had “no other option.” This is a failure of imagination that comes at an enormous moral cost. There are always choices. The choice to engage normalizes. The choice to grant visas legitimizes. The choice to conduct technical-level meetings with an unrecognized regime that has eliminated women from public life is not neutral — it is a statement about whose rights are negotiable.

Rights organizations — from Human Rights Watch to Afghan civil society groups — have been unequivocal: forced returns to Afghanistan under current Taliban rule are neither safe nor ethically defensible for the broad population of Afghan asylum-seekers. The humanitarian crisis is acute. Millions face hunger. The economy has collapsed. And for women specifically, return is not merely hardship — it is consignment to a system that treats them as non-persons before the law.

What the International Community Must Do

The European Union retains significant leverage precisely because it has not formally recognized the Taliban. That leverage — moral, legal, and diplomatic — is squandered with every meeting, every visa, every communiqué that treats the Taliban as a normal partner in technical discussions. Recognition withheld is power. Recognition normalized is its abdication.

The international community — and Europe above all — must reaffirm that what is occurring in Afghanistan is not a governance disagreement or a policy divergence. It is the systematic destruction of women and girls as a class. It is, in every meaningful sense, a feminicide. And a feminicide demands accountability, not accommodation.

The #WeStandWithAfghanWomen movement is not a slogan. It is a demand for coherence: that the same standards Europe claims to defend within its borders and to impose on trading partners be applied, without exception, to the Taliban regime. Afghan women and girls are watching what Europe does, not what it says.

It is not too late to choose accountability over convenience. But time is running out — and so is credibility.

Manel Msalmi

FFN Chief Executive  ·  Founder & President, European Association for the Defense of Minorities

Manel Msalmi is a human rights advocate and interfaith peace activist specializing in the rights of religious and ethnic minorities across the MENA region and Europe. As Chief Executive of Faith & Freedom News and founder of the European Association for the Defense of Minorities, she has been a leading voice on religious freedom, gender justice, and the protection of vulnerable communities from state-sponsored persecution.