Afghan asylum approvals plunge as UK denies women fleeing Taliban

[IwantToRetire]

Hundreds of Afghan women have been refused asylum in the UK in the past year amid plummeting grant rates, new analysis shows.

Labour have been accused of a “betrayal” of women and girls fleeing repression as data shows that Afghan refugees now have a smaller chance of getting sanctuary in the UK than they did before the Taliban takeover.

Analysis of government data by charity Amnesty International UK shows that the grant rate on Afghan asylum claims has fallen from 96 per cent to 34 per cent over the time that Labour has been in office.

This is lower than before the Taliban returned to power, when approval rates were between 45 and 62 per cent, a paper published by the charity on Tuesday found. In 2025, 370 Afghan women were refused asylum, Home Office data shows.

continues at https://www.aol.com/articles/afghan-asylum-approvals-plunge-uk-162828323.html

I do not understand this at all but only have the article to go by.

i assume these women must be in the UK upon an asylum application. And that these applications have been made several years ago for the decisions and appeals to reach a final end, takes years.

So the dramatic rate in dropping of grants has to be historic.

but the change in circumstance for women from Afghanistan, surely could not be refused on the basis of an undoubted persecuted group now.

the article makes no sense to me.

I can believe that the number of Afghan women and girls successfully getting asylum in the UK has fallen but that report is not helpful as it does not separate out women and men and to be meaningful it has to and it has to explore the sex difference and why.

Given women in Afghanistan are abused because of their sex, to not even separate out men and women is highly, highly offensive.

Women face horrendous human rights abuses under the Taliban, in fact they don't have human rights at all currently, men don't face anything close to that level of persecution. Many more Afghan men than women arrive via the small boats route on our shores claiming asylum (in part they can take this route because of the fact they have greater freedoms than the women at home, not least being able to receive medical care in Afghanistan, something denied women) and there is less reason to grant men asylum not least because their places should be taken by women who face torture, slavery and complete lack of human rights in Afghanistan. Women have a far greater reason to need to escape the Taliban than men and - having experienced real human rights abuses based on their sex - are far more likely than Afghan men to agree with British values when it comes to women's rights and pose basically no risk to residents of the UK, unlike the men.

I don't think this man should get asylum here for example as he's shown a pretty Taliban like attitude to girls - Afghan asylum seeker jailed for raping girl, 12, in Nuneaton - BBC News. I'd happily have an entire hotel of Afghan women (biological sex=female) on my doorstep, the men not so much.

Amnesty International pretends not to know what a woman is though, despite the fact of sex being pretty central to women's human rights abuses as in Afghanistan. So perhaps not surprising they're not making the distinction between male and female asylum seekers that is absolutely needed in this case.

My take on the unclear data presented is that it's actually mostly men being denied asylum as they are the ones arriving here in much larger numbers (and are economic migrants, not facing human rights abuses at home).

Women can't get to the UK very easily their slavery is so extreme in Afghanistan now.

ahhh i feel stupid now had to go and re read the article. It flip flops doesn’t it to fools the cursory reader.

makes sense now.

I mean Afghan women have no opportunity to flee now.

Afghanistan is one of many hell-holes in the world, and women are the most oppressed in all of them. I accept that this small island can’t take in everyone who wants a better life.

But we should prioritise female refugees from countries where women’s human rights are specifically denied by law as well as by tradition. It’s also pretty obvious that men who have been taught from birth that women are worthless are more likely to harm women over here.

I haven't read it in detail, but assumed it was more to do with the current situation in Afghanistan where women have less and less autonomy.

There is nothing to indicate that this is anything to do with being a refugee or attempting to illegally entering the UK. But not being able to apply via the limited number of ways it can be done by someone still in their own country.

Although in fact one of the major reason for boat crossings etc., is because the UK has no clear route to apply to be accepted as an asylum seeker because Embassies etc., no long deal with issues like this. (If anyone remembers what a complete CU it was for Ukrainians to apply to temporary asylum in the UK.)

However have now found the actual Amnesty Report which I will try and read later. This may explain better than the article.

For anyone who is interested https://www.amnesty.org.uk/knowledge-hub/all-resources/persecution-faced-by-women-girls-in-afghanistan-and-iran/

I also want to comment that 16 years for raping a 12 year old and causing her lifelong suffering is a fucking joke. And I don't want that rapist staying here once he's released - very unfair on his victim for a start. She'll only be 27 or so. Why should she live the rest of her life looking over her shoulder? Ridiculous.

Funnily enough he didn't bother bringing his sisters or mum with him. And one of the first things he did was rape a 12 year old. Bringing Taliban values to the UK. No thank you.

And just to be clear, I'm very much in favour of investing in a safe and legal route for women and girls to get out of Afghanistan and come to the UK. Ideally they will take over the spaces and resources currently being used by fit young men facing much lesser human rights abuses in their home countries and arriving on small boats who can quite easily go elsewhere and claim asylum. Some of whom have in fact already tried to claim asylum elsewhere in Europe and were denied, or even committed and been sentenced for crimes in other countries (and then moved on) that unaccountably were not picked up once they entered the UK and they were not detained for the safety of others, so then were free to rape children.

We do have limited resources that should be prioritised towards helping those facing the worst human rights abuses (unquestionably women and girls in Afghanistan) and who pose the least risk to the existing population (also women and girls).

Why doesn't the government allow claims from women, but not men? Given the much greater oppression of women in Afghanistan no one in their right mind could claim this discriminated against men.

One of the many problems with the current wave of 'small boats' immigration is how male it is - nothing good can ever come of that kind of imbalance.

For me, sex could be an important part of any future 'points based' migration system. Being female could count in your favour in the same way as other criteria such as skills, qualifications, English proficiency, etc.

The asylum process is entirely male centric. Even more so with Labour’s policies.

Agree with all of this. How amazing would it be if all the asylum hotels were filled with women rescued from Afghanistan (& Iran).

100% agree, as I expect would most women. Sadly we have a misogynist for a prime minister and until he and his party have gone, women and girls here or anywhere else, are bottom of the priority list.

It's a glaring problem - it's a scandal in the UK and other European countries, men are riding roughshod over women. And it's only getting worse until governments grow back bones and stop allowing unfettered male immigration from countries where women are 2nd class citizens (putting it mildly).

At least Germany has started the process. Firstly acknowledging the issue.

'The Germany-wide statistics on sexual violence were also sobering. An internal study by the German federal law enforcement agency, leaked to a Zurich newspaper, revealed that asylum-seekers have committed some 7,000 sexual assaults (ranging from groping to gang-rape ) between 2015 and 2023. Although they make up only 2.5 per cent of the population, asylum-seekers made up 13.1 per cent of all sexual-assault suspects in 2021.

In 2023, there were 761 gang-rapes registered in Germany — almost two per day; 47.5 per cent of the suspects were foreigners. The frequency of such crimes — which were rare in Germany as late as the 1990s — has hovered between 600 and 800 per year for the past 7 years. The statistics go on for page after mind-numbing (or mind-boggling) page. Berlin’s police chief delivered the upshot: “Bluntly stated, our numbers show that violence in Berlin is young, male, and has a non-German background.” What is straining German law enforcement (and society) is the sheer number of young male asylum-seekers. Germany famously relaxed its border controls in 2015-2016, permitting an influx of some 1.3 million people from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey.

Then as now, about 70 per cent of asylum-seekers were male and most are under 35 years old.Current numbers are off this peak but still high: in 2023, 351,000 asylum-seekers entered Germany, more than the population of Germany’s former capital Bonn. Most of these men have no German skills, little education (a 2016 study revealed only 34 per cent could read the Latin alphabet), no experience with alcohol, and no experience interacting with women not related to them.'

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260301064225/thecritic.co.uk/germany-is-acknowledging-the-unspeakable/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20260301064225/thecritic.co.uk/germany-is-acknowledging-the-unspeakable/

https://thecritic.co.uk/germany-is-acknowledging-the-unspeakable/

But that is how it should be

The problem isn't Afghan or other nationalities, per se, it's (some but too many) Afghan MEN.

There are innocent men in terrible situations right now, Afghanistan is grim for men though nowhere near what it's like for women.

But I think saving women should be the immigration priority. Women don't tend to cause the problems men do and tend to be in much more danger in many countries.

It's not quite as simple as men riding roughshod over women : if women and children flee alongside men that usually shows extreme danger. If it's mainly men arriving that suggests it's more likely to be economic immigration rather than severe danger.

Chris Bayliss explains it here.
'Refugees can be discerned by group characteristics. They are predominantly women, children and elderly people; they are usually carrying as much with them as they can bring, and they are unlikely to have destroyed or offloaded documents that identify their origins. There are many individual exceptions, but if the arrivals from a particular place during a particular period display these characteristics, they are more likely to be motivated by the need to flee for safety’s sake.

If a group of people making a journey from one place to another is composed predominantly of young men, with the women, children and elderly having remained behind, this suggests that the journey is more dangerous than staying put, and that such people are probably not refugees.'

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250219005118/thecritic.co.uk/we-know-the-difference-between-ukrainians-and-gazans/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20250219005118/thecritic.co.uk/we-know-the-difference-between-ukrainians-and-gazans/

Otoh Afghanistan is a different case : both sexes want to escape and women are in more danger obviously but tragically are mainly completely stopped from leaving.

As said up thread the real problem is there is no organised, coherent application process for those seeking asylum in individual countries (this is what caused chaos when the UK said it would accept applications from Ukrainians).

This why we have the silly game, which a lot of people are making a lot of money out of, which is if you get to the UK you can claim asylum.

So, like it or not, even if a family as a whole wants to come to the UK from Afghanistan, or any number of countries where people are oppressed or starving, old fashioned sexism decides who goes, who stays to look after the children.

And even if not stated openly, women trying this route are from more likely to end up being exploited, raped and forced into prostitution.

If you were a cynic you might say that the current situation, created by various UK Governments, is intended to deliberately bring about really negative images of refugees.

If instead you saw planes or even cross channel ferries disembarking families with an voice over saying this family has a father bringing X skills, and a mother ready to work for the NHS there wouldn't be anything for all the outrage.

And as said on so many other threads, if more Brits aren't prepared to have children, we are going to need people who want to come and live here.

Of course it would be nice to think that the UK would want to work out a system that helped women who wanted to escape their oppression in a fundamentalist country.

If I remember rightly there was a privately organised escape route for some women from Afghanistan, but they were all women who had a level of education and high powered job experience.

So the ordinary Afghan woman on her own probably has little or no chance to apply.

So true. I feel the deluge of fit young men (who've often been denied asylum elsewhere) who're just allowed in housed, given money, no checks on their risk, no protections for female staff dealing with them (RIP Rhiannon Whyte, I will not forget you), is going to make the UK more and more dangerous for girls.

It's already the case that girls have fewer freedoms than I did at that age. There are many times where parents won't let them go out because of the risk.

It's almost like it's a plan to head towards a Talibanesque rollback of women's rights - coordinated from several sides.

Another scandal that gets little notice is that a lot of these men arrive, use the asylum system for a bit, then disappear into the black market.

I'm so scared for our daughters.

Looking at Rhiannon Whyte's murder it's difficult not to conclude that the government sees the death of working class women like her as acceptable collateral damage for their political misogyny and warped elite priorities.

It was insane and a dereliction of duty of the state and the asylum hostel operator (who no doubt is getting millions for housing illegal immigrants) that Rhiannon was left to walk home without protection. No one knows how many criminals there are in the illegal male arrivals but all of them could overpower Rhiannon (males have 160% the punch power of women). Many if not all are from countries that see women as disposable and not deserving of human rights.

Female business idea - probably a woman only taxi service near the hotels / hostels could be a great idea. You'd think after Rhiannon's murder they'd be ensuring taxis to get home for their female staff but I bet they're not.

I hear you @womendeserveequalhumanrights. Women and girls are the last consideration in this.

Agree with all of this!