LONDON (INP) A judgment has ruled that Afghanistan is a safe place to return asylum-seekers, despite bomb attacks throughout the country hundreds of Afghans living in Britain face being deported after immigration judges ruled that their home country's bloody conflict did not make the region an unsafe place to return failed asylum-seekers. The test ruling opens the way for deportation flights to southern parts of the war-torn country where thousands of civilians have lost their lives since the toppling of the Taliban in 2001. Three judges of the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal have ruled that the level of "indiscriminate violence" was not enough to permit Afghans to claim general humanitarian protection in the United Kingdom. The ruling prevents them from arguing that the country is a dangerous place. Thursday night refugee campaigners said the situation was much more dangerous than it was being represented by the UK Government and the courts. A spokesman for the charity Refugee and Migrant Justice said: "It is now going to be very difficult for people from Afghanistan seeking asylum in Britain to win their claim by arguing that Afghanistan is a dangerous country. This decision really does take us back to square one." Peter Kessler, the UN Refugee Agency's senior external affairs officer in the UK, said: "We are in disagreement with the conclusion that there can be returns during the winter months. The UNHCR has consistently advised that returns should not take place over the winter months and only individuals from Kabul with family or other support structures may be returned." The judges said: "Nobody is suggesting that the situation in Afghanistan is anything but a very long way short of ideal but the numbers of civilians killed by indiscriminate violence turns out to be a great deal less than might otherwise have been expected." Turning down an asylum claim by a Afghan man, 20, from Nangarhar, the court ruled that civilian casualty figures were not high enough to warrant protection under European law. The judgment also made it clear that an asylum-seeker had to show why it was not possible to be relocated to another part of Afghanistan if they had succeeded in proving that they faced persecution in their own region. Lawyers for the Home Office argued in court that progress by the US military had "yielded results". Evidence submitted by the Government showed that apart from one incident when an air strike erroneously targeted a wedding celebration, killing 37 civilians, there was a reduction in civilian casualties caused by pro-government forces. In the judgment, the three senior immigration judges observed: "It is very difficult, from reading a number of qualitative reports concerning various incidents occurring in different parts of a country, to get a reliable feel for what is really going on. Many of the incidents are reported more than once, and the political stance of those reporting the incident is not always clear."
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