European Parliament backs migrant return hubs outside EU borders

The European Parliament has approved a controversial legislative framework that would allow the European Union to deport rejected asylum seekers to so-called return hubs located beyond the bloc's borders. The vote on 26 March passed by 389 votes to 206, with 12 abstentions, moving the proposal a decisive step closer to becoming law. The measure now enters trilogue negotiations between the Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the EU to agree a final text.

What the proposal actually does

Under the approved text, member states would be empowered to transfer individuals whose asylum claims have been finally rejected to designated centres in third countries. Those centres would not be on EU soil, placing them outside the direct jurisdiction of European courts and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The legislation also introduces coercive measures: migrants who refuse to board flights or cooperate with relocation would face mandatory detention and re-entry bans of up to five years. The Commission would be tasked with negotiating agreements with partner countries willing to host such facilities, a process that has already proven diplomatically fraught.

The concept is not new. Denmark has pursued a similar model since 2021, passing legislation to process asylum seekers in Rwanda before a change of government paused implementation. The Netherlands explored a comparable arrangement with Uganda in 2023 but abandoned it after legal advice concluded it would violate the European Convention on Human Rights. The EU-wide proposal attempts to create a harmonised legal basis that could withstand scrutiny from the Court of Justice of the European Union, though many lawyers remain unconvinced.

Human rights warnings and legal precedents

International Rescue Committee EU advocacy director Marta Welander warned that the hubs would create "legal black holes" for asylum seekers. "They will be located outside of EU territory, where policymakers cannot guarantee that people's rights will be upheld," she said. The concern is structural: once a person is physically outside the EU, the bloc's legal obligations, non-refoulement, access to legal remedy, protection from inhuman or degrading treatment, become significantly harder to enforce. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly ruled that states cannot evade their Convention responsibilities by outsourcing migration control.

Two recent precedents loom large. The United Kingdom's Safety of Rwanda Act, which sought to declare Rwanda a safe third country by legislative fiat, was dismantled by the UK Supreme Court in November 2023 and subsequently scrapped by the Starmer government in July 2024 after costing an estimated £700 million. Italy's protocol with Albania, signed in November 2023 to process up to 36,000 migrants annually in two centres near Shëngjin and Gjader, has stalled after Albanian constitutional court challenges and Italian judicial rulings blocking transfers. As of March 2026, not a single asylum seeker has been processed under the scheme.

The political bargain behind the text

The most striking feature of Thursday's vote was not the margin but the coalition that produced the text. According to multiple parliamentary sources and reporting by Deutsche Welle, the final wording emerged from direct negotiations between the European People's Party Group, the Parliament's largest group, anchored by Germany's CDU and CSU, and the Europe of Sovereign Nations group, which includes Alternative for Germany (AfD), Poland's Confederation and other hard-right parties. Green MEP Erik Marquardt, who sits on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, conducted a line-by-line comparison and identified 38 specific formulations in the draft that originated from ESN amendments.

"We are making EU deportation policies dependent on a party which had been categorised by many as extreme-right due to its remigration fantasies," Marquardt said in a plenary intervention. The AfD's concept of "remigration", the mass expulsion of people with migrant backgrounds, including German citizens, has been monitored by Germany's domestic intelligence service as a potential threat to the constitutional order. That the CDU/CSU, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, negotiated directly with AfD MEPs marks a rupture in German and European parliamentary convention. The EPP leadership argues it was a pragmatic necessity to secure a majority; critics say it legitimises a party that rejects the EU's foundational values.

Member state divisions run deep

The coalition pushing the proposal is narrow but determined. Denmark, Austria, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands form the core group advocating external processing. Denmark's government has long made "zero asylum seekers" a stated goal. Austria's coalition includes the far-right Freedom Party. Greece faces acute pressure on its islands and sees external hubs as a deterrent. Germany's shift under Merz reflects domestic polling that shows migration as a top-tier voter concern ahead of the 2025 federal election. The Netherlands, under a Geert Wilders-tolerated minority government, has made return policy a condition of its support.

Opposition comes from unexpected quarters. France and Spain, both Mediterranean frontline states, have questioned the scheme's effectiveness. Paris argues that bilateral readmission agreements with countries of origin, not third-country hubs, are the only workable solution. Madrid warns that external centres could become pull factors for smuggling networks and create diplomatic friction with host nations. Sweden, Finland and Belgium have expressed reservations about the legal viability. The Commission, while formally supportive of "innovative solutions", has privately cautioned that the proposal may not survive a challenge in Luxembourg.

Operational questions nobody has answered

Beyond the legal and political fights, the proposal is strikingly vague on implementation. No third country has formally agreed to host an EU return hub. Rwanda, often cited as a candidate, has said it will not accept migrants from any country other than the UK under its existing (now defunct) arrangement. Albania is already saturated by the Italian protocol. North Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia have all rejected overtures. African nations such as Niger, Mauritania and Senegal have insisted that any cooperation must come with substantial development aid and visa liberalisation, conditions the EU has been reluctant to meet.

Cost is another black hole. The UK spent roughly £2.9 billion on its Rwanda scheme before cancellation, processing zero asylum seekers. Italy's Albania protocol budgets €670 million over five years for a capacity that remains theoretical. The European Commission's impact assessment, leaked to journalists in February, estimates annual costs of €1.2 billion to €2.8 billion for a hub system handling 50,000 people, a figure that assumes high cooperation rates from third countries and low legal challenge rates. Both assumptions are optimistic.

The deterrence theory and its critics

Proponents argue that the mere existence of return hubs will deter irregular migration. The logic, articulated by Danish Immigration Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek in a 2024 paper, is that "credible removal capacity" breaks the business model of smugglers by reducing the probability of a successful asylum claim to near zero. Critics counter that deterrence policies have consistently failed to reduce arrivals. The EU's 2016 Turkey deal, the 2017 Libya memorandum, and the 2023 Tunisia agreement all coincided with fluctuating but persistent crossing numbers. Frontex data shows 380,000 irregular border crossings in 2024, the highest since 2016, despite a thickening web of externalisation agreements.

There is also the question of who actually gets returned. Eurostat figures for 2024 show that only 22 per cent of return decisions issued by member states were executed. The bottleneck is not legal authority, it is the refusal of countries of origin to readmit their nationals, the inability to identify undocumented migrants, and the resource constraints of national return units. Return hubs do not solve these problems; they relocate them. A rejected Afghan asylum seeker in a hub in, say, North Macedonia is no easier to return to Kabul than one in a German detention centre.

What happens next

The legislation now enters trilogue. The Council's position, agreed by interior ministers in December 2025, is broadly similar but includes a "safeguard clause" allowing member states to opt out of hub transfers if they can demonstrate equivalent return capacity. The Commission will mediate. A final agreement could be reached before the summer recess, with entry into force in 2027. But the legal challenges are already being prepared. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles has announced it will seek an annulment action at the Court of Justice if the final text does not include explicit jurisdictional guarantees for hub residents. The Advocate General's opinion in a parallel case on the Italy-Albania protocol, due in September 2026, will provide an early indicator of the Court's thinking.