The return of returns: Europe’s migration debate, ten years after the EU-Turkey deal

On 18 March 2016, the European Council and Turkey concluded an agreement intended to halt irregular migration from Turkey to the EU by returning to Turkey from Greece those whose applications had been considered inadmissible^[1].

The Return Regulation and the establishment of return hubs

Ten years on, European institutions are negotiating a legislative file (the Return Regulation) aimed at creating a common EU-wide system for the deportation (“return”) of third-country nationals in an irregular situation by simplifying and harmonising return procedures across the bloc. The proposed rules, presented by the European Commission on 11 March 2025, introduce the legal possibility to transfer individuals who have received a final return decision (usually following a second instance rejection of their asylum application by an appeals authority) to a third country, after an agreement -or even an informal arrangement- has been concluded either bilaterally or at Union level. Those individuals who don’t leave the country voluntarily following the issuance of a return decision will be forcibly removed and transferred to a so-called “return hub”, a facility or designated location in a country outside the EU where they will remain while awaiting their final deportation; if their onward return is not possible, the Council considers that return hubs can also function as final destinations.

Among the numerous concerns raised by human rights watchdogs regarding the proposed regulation, including by 16 UN Special Procedure mandate holders and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, the most significant relate to potential threats to the principle of non-refoulement and the normalisation of punitive, disproportionate and -potentially prolonged- detention. Under the proposal, detention could last for up to 24 months, compared to the current maximum of 18 months. In addition, return hubs could be used to detain and deport individuals without sufficient legal safeguards, access to legal counsel or adequate procedural guarantees.

The proposed regulation also leaves several important questions unresolved. In particular, it does not clearly address how these offshore facilities would be monitored for potential human rights violations, nor does it ensure effective institutional oversight in the conclusion of the agreements establishing them. Notably, the proposal allows such deals to be based on informal arrangements rather than formal agreements, meaning that approval by a parliamentary body or the European Commission would not necessarily be required. These shortcomings raise serious concerns regarding both transparency and the allocation of legal responsibility.

During the December 8th, 2025 Justice and Home Affairs Council, the Ministers agreed on the Council’s position on the Return Regulation, which will serve as the basis for the Council to enter into trialogue negotiations with the European Parliament and the European Commission. From its side, the European Parliament has called for an extraordinary half-hour meeting of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (the LIBE committee) on March 9th, 2026 during March’s EP plenary session for the sole purpose of adopting the draft report and authorising the rapporteur, Malik Azmani, to enter interinstitutional negotiations on behalf of the Parliament. The Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the EU appears eager to have the regulation adopted during its mandate (January-June 2026), which is illustrated by the attention it devotes to it, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise if the negotiations on the specific file were fast-tracked citing urgency - especially given the increasing trend of basing policymaking less on evidence and more on political beliefs, party platforms and voter sentiment. 

On the part of the European Commission, a low-key secretive network of officials composed of representatives from all member states, Schengen-associated countries, the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) and Frontex, and chaired by the EU’s Return Coordinator, Mari Juritsch, the High Level Network on Returns (HLNR), has been assigned the role of reinforcing the coherence of the Union’s efforts to increase deportations.

According to several media reports, building on the provisions of the under negotiation regulation on returns, a coalition of five countries -Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Greece- has taken the lead towards the establishment of the first return hubs outside EU territory. The coalition aspires to set an example for the rest of the member states, proving that such a model is feasible, while they have already started engaging in under-the-radar talks with non-EU governments in search of the ones who would be willing to host those hubs given the appropriate incentives. 

Offshoring migration management: Lessons from Australia and Italy on safeguarding, legal responsibility and finances

Although return hubs are presented as an innovative policy solution, they are in fact far from novel. Australia first introduced offshore processing of asylum applications and immigration detention in Nauru and Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) in 2001. In a 2023 landmark judgment, the Australia’s High Court ruled that the country’s system of indefinite immigration detention was unlawful, prompting the release of nearly 300 individuals who had been held indefinitely in onshore detention because their removal was not feasible - either due to protection risks in their countries of origin or because they were stateless. This illustrates how policies such as offshore processing and externalised detention can create accountability gaps, allowing states to relocate asylum seekers outside their territory and therefore outside the full reach of their domestic legal frameworks, where oversight and legal safeguards are limited.

In January 2025, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found Australia responsible for the prolonged and arbitrary detention of asylum seekers held on Nauru, while in January 2026 the UN Committee against Torture found that Australia had failed to prevent the exposure of an Iranian asylum seeker to torture and ill-treatment during his detention in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In response to the Committees’ decisions in 2025 and 2026, Australia denied its legal responsibility over human rights violations that had occurred in the two facilities, claiming that it didn’t exercise jurisdiction in Nauru and PNG and that responsibility rested with the two states. However, both Committees reiterated that Australia exercised sufficient control over the offshore processing centres in Nauru and Manus Island through funding, management and contractual arrangements with service providers. Because Australia established the facilities and transferred asylum seekers there as a matter of policy, the Committees considered that it retained jurisdiction over the complainants. It therefore emphasised that states remain bound by their international obligations wherever they exercise effective control over individuals, including through arrangements implemented outside their territory.

In light of the emergence of similar policies across Europe, Mahjoub El Haiba, UN Human Rights Committee member, emphasised that the Committee’s decision concerning Australia should serve as a warning to other states considering the outsourcing of migration-related operations and highlighted that “Offshore detention facilities are not human-rights free zones.” to which he added “Where a state exercises effective control over an area, its obligations under international law remain firmly in place and cannot be transferred.” 

Despite the Committees’ condemnation, the above-mentioned cases underscore broader structural challenges in enforcing international protection standards: in the absence of effective accountability mechanisms, states may increasingly rely on the externalisation of asylum responsibilities to third countries, often with adverse consequences for the rights of people on the move.^[2]

Alongside their severe human impact, externalisation measures carry a heavy financial cost. According to a Human Rights Watch report, in 2024-2025, the Australian Department of Home Affairs spent an estimated US$390 million (337,527,450 EUR) on offshore processing in Nauru only, equating to roughly US$3.9 million (3,375,001 EUR) per resident, compared to just US$2,750 (2,380 EUR) per year for a person living in the Australian community on a bridging visa. This stark discrepancy highlights the high financial cost of offshore detention relative to community-based alternatives. 

Similar concerns have emerged in the European context. Italy’s offshore repatriation centres (CPRs) operating in Albania under Italian jurisdiction and management have been heavily criticised for their high financial cost. Investigations indicate that the construction of the facilities cost more than 74 million EUR, with per-bed costs significantly exceeding those of comparable reception or detention facilities within Italy. As indicated by a different investigation, the cost of deportation flights within the context of the Meloni-Rama deal is not insignificant either. In May 2025, five Egyptian nationals were deported from the Tirana International Airport on a charter flight from Rome to Cairo. The stopover in Tirana to pick the five Egyptian nationals up reportedly cost 6,300 EUR per person. 

Taken together, the experiences of Australia and Italy suggest that the externalisation of migration control is neither a novel nor a cost-effective solution, let alone a human rights compliant one. Rather, these examples illustrate how offshore models tend to generate significant financial costs while raising persistent human rights and accountability concerns - issues that should be carefully considered in current European discussions on the establishment of return hubs. For reasons not publicly disclosed, the European Parliament Committee on Budgets (the BUDG committee), which had been called upon to provide a budgetary assessment of the Return Regulation, decided to not provide an opinion, which, if anything, would have been probably damning for the plans of the Parliament’s majority. 

The EU-Turkey deal and the broader risks of externalisation

Circling back to the EU-Turkey agreement of 2016 ten years on, there is little evidence to suggest that it has been successful on any level, except maybe from exposing all that is wrong with what the EU institutions like to call “the external dimension of migration”,“embedding migration in international partnerships”,  or, as of recently, “migration diplomacy”. 

• It failed to break the business model of smugglers and to offer third-country nationals an alternative to putting their lives at risk, as it had proclaimed: Even though it temporarily reduced irregular arrivals to Greece, movement eventually resumed along other routes, manifesting the adaptability of people on the move and smuggling routes and proving that people will continue undertaking perilous journeys involving human smugglers for as long as fleeing is safer than the alternative.
• It enabled the instrumentalisation of migration: In February 2020 Turkey announced it would no longer stop refugees and migrants from entering Europe, in what was interpreted back then as an endeavour to force concessions from the EU. Cooperation in the context of externalisation is often framed as voluntary, but it frequently exploits power imbalances, including with EU accession candidates like Turkey. Agreements with third states turn migration into a bargaining tool, with development aid and other incentives tied to restrictive measures, effectively using refugees as leverage and diminishing their rights. Partner countries also use migration as leverage, creating interdependencies with states that may face challenges in upholding democratic standards. A striking example of the latter occurred in August 2025, when the Libyan coastguard -trained and equipped with EU funding- fired on a SOS Méditerranée search and rescue vessel for 20 minutes in international waters, highlighting the collateral risks of migration cooperation with authoritarian regimes.
• It exposed how EU funding directly facilitates violations of human rights: According to a cross-media investigation in 2024, the European Union has given billions of euros in funding for the construction and operation of removal centres in Turkey, where Afghan and Syrian refugees are being detained and from where they are being returned back to their still broadly unsafe countries of origin. The ill-treatment of refugees in those centres has also been recorded, as well as the death of some of them following their deportation.
• The deal was suspended in March 2020 unilaterally by Turkey on public health grounds, and hasn’t been resumed ever since, while it also failed to keep Turkey’s accession negotiations going (that was one of the agreed points). Nevertheless, as evident above, the migration cooperation between Turkey and the EU continues, and a further 6 billion EUR -on top of the 6 billion EUR from 2016 to 2019- has been mobilised for 2020-2027.
• Following the deal’s unilateral suspension in 2020, it was not until October 2024 that the Court of Justice of the European Union issued its decision reiterating that member states can't reject an application for asylum as inadmissible or delay its examination based on the safe third country (STC) clause (an adopted regulation by now), if the country designated as safe has stopped readmitting applicants to its territory, as was the case with Turkey back in 2020, overturning that way Greece’s long-standing practice of arbitrarily rejecting applications of Syrian, Afghan, Somali, Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationals who had reached the country via Turkey, leaving those people in a legal limbo.

For policymakers, these experiences underscore a clear imperative: any future policy on returns must be grounded in rigorous evaluation of past initiatives, careful assessment of human rights impacts and realistic appraisals of effectiveness. Without such scrutiny, the EU risks repeating the same mistakes, perpetuating ineffective and harmful migration practices.