EU set to embrace migrant offshoring hubs at today's summit
EU set to embrace migrant offshoring hubs at today's summit
Sending asylum seekers to third countries was condemned as illegal by the Commission in 2018. But this week President von der Leyen reversed and declared herself open to the idea.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in Brussels today to attend a summit of the EU’s 27 national leaders as a guest. Though he is expected to push to end the Hungarian block on further EU aid to Ukraine until the US election result is known, there is little expectation that he will be able to make Viktor Orban relent. Indeed, nobody is expecting any progress on the Ukraine issue today as the world waits to see whether a change in leadership in the United States will see the country abandoned. Instead, the issue dominating today’s summit will be migration - thanks to a dramatic reversal by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier this week.
The president sent a letter to the 27 leaders on Monday ahead of today’s summit saying the Commission would consider a new proposal on the Returns Directive to set up “return hubs outside the EU” in order to quickly deport asylum-seekers who do not have a valid claim. “The EU’s migration policy can only be sustainable if those who do not have the right to stay in the EU are effectively returned,” she wrote. “However, only around 20% of third country nationals ordered to leave have actually returned.” The Juncker Commission had proposed a common approach to returns in 2018 but there was no majority for it in Council, the upper chamber of the EU’s legislature made up of national governments. In her letter the President said it will be a first priority in her first term to make a new attempt.
Von der Leyen appeared to be endorsing the approach of far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. This week Italy started implementing its agreement with Albania to deport up to 36,000 male migrants across the Adriatic to the non-EU country. “With the start of operations of the Italy-Albania protocol, we will also be able to draw lessons from this experience in practice,” von der Leyen wrote.
It is a dramatic departure, because just six years ago the Commission said such deportations to offshore hubs is illegal under EU law. And when the Conservative government in the UK attempted to start such a scheme with Rwanda in 2022, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said: “Sending asylum-seekers more than 6,000 kilometers away and outsourcing asylum processes is not a humane and dignified migration policy.”
Albania, by contrast, is only 72 kilometers away from Italy by sea. And the other countries Italy and the EU are looking at such agreements with, Egypt and Tunisia, are also a short distance away across the Mediterranean Sea. But it’s unclear what difference the distance would make to the legality of the schemes.
The issue is that once an undocumented migrant enters an EU country’s territory and claims asylum, they are currently allowed to stay in that country while they await a judgement on their claim. They may be put in a detention center, but because of a lack of resources they are more often left to roam freely. If a decision is then reached to reject the asylum claim, the person very often goes missing - and can then end up anywhere in the EU because of the passport-free Schengen system. This was the case with the Tunisian asylum-seeker who shot and killed Swedish football fans in Brussels exactly one year ago yesterday. He was sentenced in Tunisia in 2005 to 26 years in prison for attempted murder, but he escaped from prison in 2011 and entered Europe via Lampedusa on a small boat. He sought asylum in Italy, then Norway, then Sweden, then Belgium - all of which rejected his claims. He just kept travelling around claiming asylum, and after Belgium rejected him in 2020 he remained in the country illegally. There seems to have been little attempt to track him down after the rejection.
People fall through the cracks, and that’s why only 20% of the rejected people are actually tracked down and deported (or choose to leave of their own free will). Often the migrants’ home country will refuse to take them back, leaving them in a legal limbo which results in them staying in Europe. One idea is that asylum-seekers should no longer be allowed to stay in the EU while they await the decision, but they would have to go to these “hubs” in third countries (deliberately chosen because it’s not a place they would want to go - Albania is Europe’s poorest country and is not in the EU).
But several EU countries think the concept is deplorable and violates international law. Spain’s center-left prime minister Pedro Sanchez is expected to fiercely criticize the idea today. One Council national representative told me yesterday that there are three camps: one that wants detailed conclusions on this today, one that wants vague conclusions, and one that wants no conclusions at all. “There have been vague conversations about innovative approaches,” they said. “What actually needs to happen is a more serious discussion, what exactly these various ideas might look like.”
A recent draft of the Council conclusions set to be adopted today calls for “determined action at all levels to increase and speed up” deportations. But several leaders, led by Italy’s Meloni, want the conclusions to go further and explicitly endorse offshoring hubs as the way to do that.
Meloni is by no means the only EU leader going in this direction. Two other large EU countries have recently taken actions that go against the spirit, if not the letter, of EU border law. Germany took the unilateral decision to start conducting temporary passport checks at all nine of its internal EU Schengen borders last month, without consulting its neighbors or the Commission. And Poland last week unilaterally announced it would stop processing asylum requests from migrants entering its Eastern border with Belarus, an EU external border. Warsaw says Minsk is conducting a “hybrid war” by purposefully flooding migrants across the border.
With all of these unilateral moves, time may be running out to find a European solution to an issue which is clearly driving more and more European voters toward the far right. Today’s discussion could be a pivotal turning point for how the European Union handles the migration issue.