According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), women in Afghanistan have an "exceptionally high probability of receiving protection" if they apply in Germany. BAMF said that women and girls were severely oppressed under the rule of the Islamist Taliban.
In recent months, there has been a notable increase in the number of Afghan women applying for asylum in Germany. From January to the end of July of this year, a total of more than 9,590 applications were received from female Afghan nationals.
In particular, the number of repeat applications, also known as follow-up applications, rose sharply. It is expected that the total number of Afghan women to submit asylum papers in Germany in 2025 will surpass the mark of 10,000 cases in the course of the next few weeks.
BAMF said in a statement that women and girls are "currently being completely excluded from public life and restricted in the exercise of their fundamental human rights, according to our observations."
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BAMF procedures build on ECJ ruling
BAMF however had explained earlier that one of the reasons for this recent spike in application numbers by women is directly linked to a decision issued by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in October 2024.
The ECJ ruled that the Taliban's level of subjugation and oppression of women had breached the threshold to qualify as deliberate acts of persecution, resulting — in legal terms — in Afghan women automatically being recognized as people in need of protection as refugees.
According to the BAMF, many Afghan women in Germany, who prior to this ECJ ruling had not been recognized as fully-fledged refugees but had instead been granted subsidiary protection, which is a lower protection status, have since the ruling submitted follow-up applications to be fully recognized as refugees.
Out of a total of around 9,600 asylum applications submitted for the first seven months of the year, a total of nearly 4,500 were follow-up applications, according to the KNA news agency.
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Resumption of admission program
The BAMF announcement comes on the back of the German government's resumption earlier this week of its admission scheme for vulnerable Afghans after a months-long freeze on the program.
Affected families have been informed about the resumption of the program, as first arrivals are expected to take place imminently.
Around 2,000 Afghans had reportedly received a promise of admission from Germany because they are at risk under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and at the same time are facing an impending deportation order from Pakistan.
In recent months, authorities in Pakistan have been deporting a growing number of Afghan nationals back to their homeland, with over a million people believed to have been forcibly returned already.
Pakistan had announced plans to deport more people after a new deadline on September 1, which is why the German government acted and resumed its program after some of the people identified under the program were in fact deported back to Afghanistan in recent weeks.
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with epd, KNA