Mr. Andrew Anderson:

The EU has played a big role in supporting human rights in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. I remember meeting with an EU delegation when I was in Kabul in 2007 and 2008. They were developing programmes to support human rights defenders who were at risk. We have continued to co-operate with the EU over the years. Up to a couple of years ago, it ran a specific programme for the protection of human rights defenders.

Unfortunately, in the weeks leading up to the collapse of Kabul, the EU decided that it was going to stop being directly in touch with human rights defenders inside the country and that it wanted to have NGO partners from the international level who would provide their support to human rights defenders. We were caught a little bit in a difficult context. We are the lead partner in the EU human rights defenders mechanism, which is a 12-NGO consortium that implements EU projects to support human rights defenders. We felt, in consultation with Afghan defenders, that we should agree to co-operate with the EU on providing funding to human rights defenders at risk. We had significant misgivings about doing this because this funding was being passed on as part of the EU withdrawal. Instead of managing the funding itself and being in direct contact with Afghan human rights defenders, the EU wanted to give the money to us to provide support to those Afghan defenders. This was fine on the financial side, but it involved the EU removing itself from being in direct day-to-day contact with defenders. The EU could see what direction things were going in and did not want to be responsible for helping people with whom it had been working for a decade or more, in some cases, to find a place of safety.

Of course, the EU is in a difficult place because it does not have visas. It relies on member states to provide visas to help those at most extreme risk. Our frustration was that the political leadership to address that and to co-ordinate with member states to ensure some kind of orderly and co-ordinated support, particularly for those working on EU-funded projects, did not exist. In addition to the excellent co-operation with Ireland, we have spent a lot of time in the past couple of months chasing around trying to find other EU member states that would be willing to provide visas for people who had been working on EU-funded projects, among other things. It is very frustrating that there has not been more co-ordination at least from the side of the EU, even if it does not have the power to give visas, and that there was a bit of disengagement at the moment when the crisis was most acute. This is not to say that we have not had good co-operation. We have had good co-operation with Eamon Gilmore's office and with other bits of the EU. If we are talking about the delegation in Kabul and the role of the external action service, however, we are not very impressed with how it managed things over the past few months.