France will deal “quickly” with asylum requests from evacuated Afghans



The French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra) “is organizing itself to quickly process asylum requests from people that France has evacuated” from Afghanistan, its director general Julien Boucher explained on Wednesday. People exfiltrated from Kabul will be able to initiate these procedures after a mandatory 10-day health quarantine.

Clearly, the files of more than 1,500 Afghans evacuated to Paris by special flights will be placed at the top of the list, while 8,000 asylum applications already filed by nationals of Afghanistan are still pending.

8,871 Afghans applied for asylum in 2020

However, these will not be “accelerated procedures”, underlined Mr. Boucher: these procedures are generally reserved for applicants from so-called “safe” countries, whose administration considers that their files are more likely to be rejected. .

Afghans are by far the leading asylum seekers in France, where they obtain protection in 65% of cases at first instance, at Ofpra, and more than 80% after appeal to the National Court of Law. ‘asylum. In 2020, 8,871 Afghans applied in France. Since the migration crisis of 2015, they have been around 10,000 on average each year.



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