Government spokesman Gabriel Attal assured Wednesday that “France will welcome, as every year, several thousand Afghans” and regretted the “political instrumentalisation” of Emmanuel Macron’s remarks on possible “irregular migratory flows” .
France evacuated during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday from Kabul to Abu Dhabi 216 people including 184 Afghans “from civil society in need of protection”, expected in Paris during the day. Gabriel Attal assured that France “will be there” and “will respond to its duty of solidarity and humanism”. “But it would be lying to the French not to say that these things must be organized, at European and international level”, he insisted on saying.
“We are one of the countries that host the most Afghans”
He pleaded, like Emmanuel Macron on Monday, in favor of an “international initiative” for a “distribution of asylum seekers”, without specifying how many Afghans France expected to welcome in the coming weeks. Gabriel Attal also declared “to regret the political instrumentalisation of truncated words, of bits of sentences, which is made by certain political leaders” of the words of Emmanuel Macron.
The Head of State assured Monday during a televised address that “France is doing and will continue to do its duty to protect those who are most threatened”. Before adding: but “we must anticipate and protect ourselves against the significant irregular migratory flows which would endanger those who use them and would feed trafficking of all kinds”. These statements aroused the indignation of many opposition figures on the left and several associations. The Elysee replied by assuring that “we have nothing to be ashamed of because we are one of the countries which welcome the most Afghans and which give them the most protection”.
10,000 asylum applications from Afghans per year
Since 2018, France has received some 10,000 asylum requests from Afghans for a total of around 50,000 for all the countries of the European Union. Ofpra (the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons), which has handled 8,200 cases since the start of the year, grants the request for protection in 64% of cases, a figure which reaches 89.9% after examination of appeals, against an average of 63% for the whole of the EU, according to figures given by the French Presidency.
Emmanuel Macron himself responded to the critics on Tuesday evening in Bormes-les-Mimosas, declaring: “We will all gain a lot of energy and time so that all those who spend their day commenting take eleven minutes of their time. to listen to what I said ”.