Luxembourg slams Austria, Slovenia for refusing to take in Afghan refugees

By Oliver Towfigh Nia

BERLIN (AA) - Luxembourg's foreign minister on Tuesday harshly criticized Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa for their refusal to take in Afghan refugees ahead of the European Union interior ministers' conference.

Talking to the German daily Die Welt newspaper, Jean Asselborn said: "I hope that there is resistance to Mr. Kurz from Austria and Mr. Jansa from Slovenia who are both clearly and definitely in line with Orban, Salvini, and Le Pen. They all reject direct human solidarity at this extremely dramatic moment with the tortured people in Afghanistan."

“You lose the quality of being a European. In contrast, the majority of the member states must stand for the values of the European Union," Asselborn went on to say.

Kurz has repeatedly expressed his opposition to granting protection to refugees from Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Jansa whose country currently holds the rotating EU Council Presidency, had declared on Twitter that one should only accept people "who helped us during the NATO operation" in Afghanistan.

The EU Commission had recently called on all EU countries to accept more people from Afghanistan through the resettlement program of the UN refugee agency.

"The European Union should be ready to provide 40,000 to 50,000 resettlement places for Afghan refugees," according to Asselborn.

“With this we would bring girls, women, former judges, human rights activists or other people whose lives are in immediate danger to the EU in a legal and safe way in cooperation with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)," he added.

So far this year around 330,000 Afghans have been displaced, more than half of them fleeing their homes since the US began its withdrawal in May, according to the UN.