In the refugee debate, Luxembourg’s Foreign Affairs and Migration Minister Jean Asselborn was outraged by Austria and Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (VP). “I hope that there will be resistance to Mr Kurz from Austria and Mr Jansa from Slovenia, who are both clearly and definitely in line with Orban, Salvini and Le Pen,” said the Social Democrat before the special ministerial meeting in Brussels on Tuesday. They would reject “direct human solidarity at this extremely dramatic moment with the tortured people in Afghanistan”. “You lose the quality of being a European.”
Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (VP) accused Asselborn of “cheap populism”. The criticism was “simply absurd”, he said, referring to the fact that Austria has the fourth largest community of Afghans per capita worldwide and the second largest within the EU. “It would be welcomed if Asselborn showed a similar degree of solidarity and humanity. For that, Luxembourg would have to take in six times as many Afghans as there are currently living there. Then he might be in a position to give advice. “
VP Chancellery Minister Karoline Edtstadler rejected the demand by SP Federal Party Leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner to grant “a few hundred” particularly vulnerable people from Afghanistan, for example female judges, refuge in Austria: The SP had learned “nothing” from 2015, she said.
Deportations not permitted
On Tuesday, the human rights expert Manfred Nowak from the University of Vienna stated on the subject of deportations: Even if the Taliban are ready to take back Afghans who are not entitled to asylum and who may have committed criminal offenses and to bring them to a court: Deportations to the country taken over by the radical Islamists are not permitted. You would violate the human rights convention, said Nowak. Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (VP) declared that he would only be deported if “the legal possibilities allow”.
