“The era of deportations has begun.” A few months ago, this line from far‑right Swedish MEP Charlie Weimers sounded like a provocation. Now, after the agreement on the EU’s new Return Regulation between Parliament, the member states and the Commission, it reads more like an accurate description of the European Union’s political direction. With the legal framework for sending migrants to deportation camps outside Europe nearly complete, several member states — Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and Greece — have intensified their search for countries willing to host them, mainly in Africa, far from the European continent, according to diplomatic sources. The political battle is over; the geographical one is just beginning.
Human‑rights organizations have criticized the new regulation — which comes on top of other already tough measures — and compared the EU’s trajectory to the aggressive immigration policies of Donald Trump’s administration in the United States. “This regulation will create a draconian system of detention and deportation,” says Silvia Carta, policy officer at the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM).
NGOs warn it will expose hundreds of thousands of people to imprisonment in migrant detention centers in third countries for an indefinite period (within the EU, the maximum period will be 30 months), as well as family separation and transfers to countries they do not know and with which they have no ties. “Across the Atlantic we see the violence and fear generated by the brutal enforcement of immigration law by ICE. Europe should learn from the harms of that model, rather than build its own version,” Carta added.
The European Commission insists the new regulation, together with other measures, will help increase the number of removals of applicants who have not been granted asylum. Today, just 28% of migrants whose applications are rejected return to their country of origin, according to Eurostat data that Brussels repeats constantly. Supporters argue that deportation camps would serve both as a solution and as a deterrent. “With the new rules, we have more control over who can come to the EU, who can stay, and who needs to leave,” said Interior and Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner, who supports a tougher European migration policy.
The decisive question now is whether this strategy can overcome the obstacles that doomed previous initiatives, such as Italy’s model in Albania, where it opened facilities to send asylum seekers that have cost billions and that, for now, have been a failure. The legislation is nearly finalized; what remains is whether member states can actually find places to open these deportation centers.
Cyprus’s deputy minister for migration and international protection, Nicholas Ioannides, said on Tuesday the general idea is to create them in areas possibly in Africa or Asia. “Not near Europe’s borders,” Ioannides said, stressing that, in any case, host countries must guarantee the rights of those deported.
Dutch liberal MEP Malik Azmani, the European Parliament’s lead negotiator — though the final text was drafted by the European People’s Party with support from further‑right groups — has not ruled out agreements with non‑EU Eastern European countries, though he agrees Africa is the most likely destination. In any case, he said, it is up to interested member states to negotiate.
There is urgency to negotiate. Diplomatic sources say the legal framework to open deportation camps could be ready before the summer. “Every month of delay is a month that the system keeps failing,” Azmani argued. “Europe cannot afford another period of standstill,” he said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Both Azmani and Ioannides — whose country holds the rotating EU Council presidency this semester — stress that the text, significantly tougher than the European Commission’s original proposal and reflecting the continent’s shift to the right, represents the position of a large majority of member states and MEPs on migration.
They noted in several meetings with the press that evidence of this is the fact that several countries are already actively discussing how to set up these centers in third countries. Ioannides said he is confident that more states will join that list over time.
But the same fact also shows how little progress has been made so far — “for the moment there are no tangible results,” Ioannides acknowledged in a meeting with a small group of journalists in Brussels, including EL PAÍS. Even the basic parameters of these centers are not yet defined.
The EU insists that the new law sets a “red line”: respect for the fundamental rights of migrants transferred to a third country, which must guarantee those rights. But what that means in practice remains unclear. For example, if families with children end up in these centers —a possibility opened by Parliament and now included in the final text — how will their education be guaranteed, given that they come from different countries, have been deported from different EU states, and will end up in a third country with which they have no connection and from which it is unclear when they will leave, since the law does not set a maximum stay?
Even the terminology is unsettled. It is unclear how to define people who are forcibly transferred — “deported” or “returned,” depending on Brussels’s preferred language. There is reluctance to call them “detained,” but the measure points in that direction, at least in practice, since they will not be free to leave the facility except to return to their country of origin, and no time limit has been set for how long they can be held. Even that, sources admit, is still unclear.
With the agreement reached, Ioannides said there is now “the necessary legal framework in place” for these detention centers, but admitted there are still “practical and logistical issues” to resolve.
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