In April, Italy became the first EU state to successfully send rejected asylum seekers beyond the bloc’s borders, after its first three attempts were blocked by national and European courts.
The breakthrough came as the EU is also starting to enact broader plans to shift asylum processing offshore. Those plans will also have to run a gauntlet of international laws and human rights standards that could ultimately tie them up for years, according to experts.
Only by adding Albania to its own safe third country list and rebranding detention centers as “repatriation hubs” did Italy manage to bypass a European Court of Justice ban. On April 14, it sent 40 rejected asylum seekers to the Italian-run centers there.
Under the safe third country principle, used to avoid overloading countries with asylum claims, asylum seekers can be sent for protection to a country other than the one in which they initially sought asylum.
Migration Management
Illegal immigrants are entering the EU primarily via Mediterranean sea crossings from North Africa and by overland routes through Poland and the Balkans, according to data from Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.More than 1 million migrants entered the continent in 2015, amid wars in Syria and Iraq, according to estimates by the UN Refugee Agency.
Frontex said that just over 239,000 illegal crossings were detected at the EU’s external borders in 2024—the lowest number since 2021. Illegal crossings are usually orchestrated by organized criminal networks and smugglers.
Around 912,000 asylum applications were filed in the EU in 2024 as well, a 13 percent drop from 2023, according to Eurostat. Syria represented the largest percentage of asylum seekers, at 16 percent.
She also suggested sending those with no right to stay in the EU to “return hubs” in non-EU countries, such as Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali. No such hubs have been established yet.
As the EU pursues deals to process migrants outside its borders, experts say it risks stepping into a legal minefield, especially if there are attempts to return migrants arriving in boats to their departure point, or to the territorial waters from which they came.
‘Collective Decisions’
Ana Rita Gil, a law professor at the University of Lisbon, told The Epoch Times that legal issues arise if there are attempts to “blindly” allocate a certain status to people taking migration routes via the Mediterranean from Libya or Tunisia.“We are making a deal that is blind to the people who are in the boats, because in these boats you can have irregular migrants, but you can also have asylum seekers,” she said.
Gil said that the European Convention on Human Rights forbids “these collective decisions.”
“This is called pushback, because you don’t know who is inside your boat,” she said.
European and international law also requires that any country receiving asylum seekers or rejected applicants must uphold human rights standards, including protection from torture, inhumane treatment, and refoulement—the forced return of refugees or asylum seekers to places where they may face danger.
“They have to have fair asylum procedures, meaning that everyone who is claiming to be persecuted has to have an access to a refugee status,” said Gil.
However, when sending migrants to a third party country, “you don’t know what are the conditions of detention, plus, you cannot go there and monitor,” she said.
He said that EU immigration policy is turning “more and more [toward] strengthening measures to keep people outside.”
“The union is much more focused on the return, on keeping people outside, than trying to create [a] real safe way to come to the continent,” he said.
He pointed to the Hungarian–Serbian border, where a system of transit zones keeps migrants between the two borders, without the possibility to move, waiting for the chance to apply for asylum.
The zones were initially implemented by Budapest to deal with an influx of asylum seekers during the 2015 migrant crisis; migrants were detained in the transit zones while their asylum applications were processed.
Borraccetti said that there will likely be just a small number of countries that will be able to fulfill international standards for safe third countries, meaning that “we will have just one or two—Albania, maybe, Morocco, maybe, and other countries around Europe.”
The “exploitation of migration” for political issues involves not just “creating fears” but also “boycotting any type of system that would drive us to a safer, regular migration system,” Borraccetti said.
A ‘Poor Man’s Rwanda’
Tony Smith, former director general of the UK Border Force, told The Epoch Times that effective deterrence requires there be “no hope” of return. Smith spent 40 years with Britain’s Home Office, tackling organized immigration crime and human smuggling,Smith said he was skeptical about the EU’s plans to outsource asylum processing, but that the UK had come as close as possible to such a system before it was challenged in the courts.
“I think the Rwanda deterrent, or some kind of removals deterrent, would have worked if [we'd] ever been able to make it legal,” he said.
The Rwanda scheme, agreed upon in April 2022, would have seen migrants who entered Britain illegally, including those who crossed the English Channel in small boats, put on flights to Rwanda’s capital of Kigali.
“The Rwanda plan was outsourcing. In other words, we’re going to outsource this person and [they’re] never, ever, ever going to come back whether they qualify for asylum or not,” Smith said.
The Rwanda plan, which was ultimately shelved in July 2024, was based loosely on Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s zero tolerance “stop the boat” model, used to intercept migrant boats during an unprecedented migrant crisis in 2015.
“That was the first evidence that you could do this. You could actually divert people to another country,” Smith said.
“They used Nauru or Christmas Island, they did get some back to Indonesia, but they were able to persuade the other countries to take them, and they never, ever made it to Australia. And so the boats stopped coming,” he said.
The current EU offshoring plans are “no more than a poor man’s Rwanda,” he said.
“But I wouldn’t be surprised if another EU member state would pick it up,” he said, referring to Britain’s abandoned Rwanda plan. “We put courts in there. We spent loads of money, invested in their system. So, Rwanda is really waiting for someone, and I think that is the best model,” he added.
Smith said the EU model still gives migrants hope. “We’re not saying you can’t come in here, what we’re saying is you’re going to go over there," he said.
“You’ve still got hope and expectation that we might let you in after all this.”
On the other hand, “with the Rwanda model, there was no hope,” he said.
Smith believes the EU will try to create return hubs, but will run into the same legal problems that the UK encountered.
‘Extreme Tipping Point’
Others say that the issue of whether a third country is “safe” could become a battleground in European courts.Lawyers will challenge European countries “by assessing nation states, by saying, ‘in Rwanda, it’s unsafe, in Albania, it’s unsafe,’” said Steven Woolfe, director of the Centre for Migration & Economic Prosperity, a UK think tank.
Woolfe told The Epoch Times that the international legal framework allows countries to relocate asylum procedures, as long as basic protections are upheld.
The 1951 Refugee Convention, while affirming the right to claim asylum, also allows states to reject claims from individuals who are not deemed genuine refugees or who have committed serious crimes, he said.
“I think politically, this already has now transformed British and European and U.S. politics for the last 15 years,” Woolfe said.
He called the current situation “the extreme tipping point ... in the political ramifications of the mass movement of people from all parts of the world through immigration, both legal and illegal.”
