Days after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, the EU’s top diplomat stressed the need to protect women and girls. “Cooperation with any future Afghan government will be conditioned on … respect for the fundamental rights of all Afghans,” Josep Borrell pledged. The regime’s attack on women’s rights began immediately, and has only intensified. The Taliban have barred girls from secondary school and university, legalised child marriage, prevented women from travelling without a male guardian and excluded them from jobs, parks and bathhouses. Women have been literally silenced: their voices are forbidden from being heard in public, even from within their own homes.

A new criminal code introduced last year permits men to beat their wives; even if women are able to prove the use of “obscene force”, a husband may still be sentenced to only 15 days in prison. (In contrast, harming an animal could mean five months in jail.) And restrictions on work, movement and contacts are not merely oppressive. They are often deadly in a country gripped by a humanitarian crisis. UN experts have said that this “widespread, systematic and all-encompassing” assault on women’s rights may amount to “gender apartheid”.

Yet the EU this week hosted Taliban representatives in Brussels for the first time since they returned to power. Officials said that it did not amount to recognition. But it risks “normalisation and implicit legitimisation”, as more than 80 Afghan and other human rights organisations wrote in a joint letter. Zakir Jalaly, a senior Taliban foreign ministry official, described the visit as “an important milestone in relations”.

A European Commission spokesman said that the meeting focused on returning irregular migrants “who have committed serious crimes or pose a security threat”. But Euronews reported that the invitation to the Taliban mentioned only the return of “Afghan nationals with no right to stay in the EU”.

European governments are ramping up deportation efforts in response to domestic political pressures. Last week, the European parliament backed plans to expedite removals of undocumented migrants. Measures could pave the way for ICE-style enforcement and would allow people to be detained for up to two years or sent to offshore centres. As the UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, pointed out when criticising the plans, international law prohibits returning individuals to a place where they would be at risk of serious human rights violations or other irreparable harm.

Internationally, more than 1.5 million Afghans were deported from Iran last year alone, and Pakistan has forcibly returned large numbers. Forced returnees reported threats, arbitrary detention and torture in interviews with UN officials last year.

European concerns about how Taliban rule would affect migration rates, not just Afghan lives, were voiced from the first. But even as the rights and humanitarian crises have deepened, anti-migration sentiment has come to dominate. Afghans, and especially women, are now fighting both Taliban persecution and international indifference. Governments that profess to care for them should be pushing for gender apartheid to be recognised as a crime under international law, funding essential relief efforts in Afghanistan and supporting those who have fled to create safe new lives where they can – not working with the Taliban to send more back, potentially to their deaths.