Afghanistan has signed a deal with the European Union to take back an unlimited number of its deported refugees.
The deal was signed Sunday after months of negotiations, The Guardian reports. EU threatened to withdraw aid to Afghanistan if it didn’t agree to cooperate with the process.
Afghanistan is the second most common nationality among asylum seekers in Europe after Syria, with close to 200,000 arriving in 2015.
Deporting rejected asylum seekers back to their home countries has been a major headache for many European countries. Germany has 549,209 rejected asylum seekers in the country as of June. A total of 219,000 migrants are currently set to be deported, but authorities expect just 27,000 to be expelled by the end of the year. A common obstacle is that countries refuse to cooperate with the process of bringing back their citizens.
It was recently reported that Germany is considering returning 40,000 refugees to Afghanistan as part of the new deal. (RELATED: Germany Considers Deporting Half Its Afghan Refugees)
The deal has a limit of 50 forced deportations per flight, but there is no limit of the number of flights EU can charter per day.
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