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HANOVER: A group of 47 Afghans who fled the Taliban arrived in Germany on Monday after months of waiting in Pakistan until German court rulings forced Berlin to offer them refuge.
The 10 families have been among more than 2,000 Afghans caught in limbo in Pakistan as Germany’s conservative-led government this year froze a program to offer them sanctuary.
Most of them arrived in Hanover on a commercial flight from Istanbul around 2:00 p.m. (1200 GMT), said an AFP reporter and the Airbridge Kabul initiative set up to help those affected.
An interior ministry spokeswoman confirmed that “45 Afghan nationals entered Germany. These are all individuals who obtained visas through legal proceedings... All of these individuals have fully completed the admission procedure and security screening.”
The Airbridge Kabul initiative later said that two more people had arrived after catching a later connection from Istanbul.
A mother and daughter who did not want to give their names told AFP they were looking forward to their new life in Germany.
“It feels very good and pleasant when girls can go to school, study, and I can also work, study, integrate into society, and learn the language,” the mother said.
“I am very happy that after many difficulties and challenges, we finally managed to reach a good life,” said the daughter, aged 20.
“I could have done many things, studied, achieved a position and reached the goals I had for myself, but unfortunately, I couldn’t. From now on, I will achieve them,” she said.
Sanctuary scheme
After the Taliban returned to power in 2021, Germany set up a scheme to offer sanctuary to Afghans who had worked for German institutions or were otherwise deemed at high risk of persecution, including rights activists and journalists.
But the scheme was frozen under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who took office in May, as part of a wider crackdown on immigration.
While the Afghans have been left stranded in Pakistan, authorities there have also stepped up a crackdown on Afghans living in the country without residency.
Last month, Berlin said around 450 Afghans waiting to come to Germany had been detained, and more than 200 of them were sent back to their Taliban-run homeland.
While alarm has grown about their fate, Germany has agreed to resume accepting some of the others.
The government said last week that Afghans for whom “courts have found that Germany is legally obliged to issue visas” would travel to Germany “in stages” once they had cleared security checks.
The 10 main applicants who arrived on Monday were eight women and two men who had been involved in “politics, the justice system and journalism,” said Eva Beyer, a spokeswoman for the Airbridge Kabul initiative.
Around 85 other stranded Afghans have begun legal proceedings against Germany, “and there are more every day,” Beyer said.

LONDON: Britain said on Monday it would suspend applications from registered refugees to bring family members into the country in order to give the government time to toughen the rules, its latest attempt to cut the number of arrivals.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government is under mounting pressure to reduce the number of asylum seekers reaching Britain from France in small boats, after hotels housing migrants became a focal point for weeks of sometimes violent demonstrations.
Interior minister Yvette Cooper told parliament that more and more refugees had applied to bring in family members, placing pressure on housing across the country.
Many were applying to bring over families within about a month whereas, as recently as 2019, they were waiting one or two years or more.
Cooper said she would suspend the system while the government looked to toughen the rules.
“The system has to be controlled and managed based on fair and properly enforced rules, not chaos and exploitation driven by criminal smuggler gangs,” she said.
Accused of moving too slowly, the government says it is tackling a problem left by previous Conservative-led administrations by trying to speed up the processing of asylum claims and brokering return deals with other nations.
But the public discontent has handed Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party a consistent lead in opinion polls, prompting the government to go further.
Under the current system, an asylum seeker granted indefinite leave to remain can bring their partner if they can prove they have been in a relationship for at least two years, and children under the age of 18.
Just over 29,000 people have come to Britain unofficially on small boats so far this year, up 38 percent on the comparable period in 2024.