Austria has carried out a deportation back to Afghanistan for the first time since the radical Islamists took power in the Central Asian country in 2021.
This morning, a 31-year-old man was sent by plane to the Afghan capital of Kabul via Istanbul, accompanied by Austrian police officers. He had previously been found guilty of rape and grievous bodily harm and had spent four years in an Austrian prison.
Interior minister Gerhard Karner (Austrian People’s Party, ÖVP) said further deportations were being planned: “We announced the deportation of convicted criminals to Afghanistan, and now we are implementing these deportations.
“We will continue to pursue this tough but necessary course of action. Further deportations of convicted criminals to Afghanistan are being prepared and will then be carried out.”
Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker (ÖVP) added that Austria would show “zero tolerance” of people who had forfeited their right to asylum by committing crimes.
To enable the deportation, an Austrian delegation had travelled to Afghanistan earlier this year for talks with the Taliban regime. In September, Taliban representatives came to Vienna to co-ordinate the deportation procedure. According to media reports, around 30 people are currently slated for deportation to Afghanistan.
It is the third country to which the Austrian government has recently resumed deportations after a long hiatus.
In July, a convicted criminal was deported to Syria in the first-ever deportation from a European Union member state since the fall of the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
On 2 September, Austrian authorities carried out the first deportation to Somalia in 20 years – sending two convicted drug dealers back to the impoverished African country.
The administration has already faced headwinds from the courts, though. The deportation of a second Syrian national planned for August was delayed by several weeks by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The ostensibly stricter policy on deportations has so far done little to curb the influx of foreign asylum seekers to Austria. In the first nine months of 2025, 13,000 people claimed asylum in the country, among them more than 4,200 Afghans.
Gernot Darmann, an MP and speaker on security issues for the opposition Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), accused Stocker of “show politics”.
Darmann said: “The facts clearly show that Stocker’s much-heralded announcement that he wants to make deportations to Syria and Afghanistan standard practice has had no dampening effect on immigration into our social welfare system – if only because ÖVP interior minister Karner is deporting Syrians only in dribs and drabs.
“[Karner’s] announcements are nothing more than hot air, mocking the population!”
