EU move to open camps for failed asylum-seekers

European leaders are expected to agree on plans for deportation camps outside the EU following demands for action against asylum-seekers.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Berlin. Picture: Getty Images.

European leaders are expected to agree on plans to establish migrant deportation camps outside the EU in a historic shift that follows growing demands for punitive “sanctions” against failed asylum-seekers.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has opened the door to proposals for so-called “return hubs” set up outside the bloc to hold migrants served with deportation papers by member states.

It represents a shift in policy and comes a day after the first migrants intercepted at sea by Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy were sent to Albania to have their asylum claims processed.

The Italian model has been held up by Ms von der Leyen as a potential example of the new European approach.

In a letter to Europe’s leaders before a conference on Thursday, Ms von der Leyen wrote: “We should continue to explore possible ways forward as regards the idea of developing return hubs outside the EU, especially in view of a new legislative proposal on return.”

The plans represent a major volte-face since 2018, when the commission, then led by Jean-Claude Juncker, ruled that creating “externally located return centres” outside the EU would breach international refugee conventions.

Two years ago Ylva Johansson, the EU home affairs commissioner, described Britain’s plans to process asylum claims in Rwanda, now shelved by Keir Starmer, as “outsourcing … not a humane and dignified migration policy”.

The Brussels backtracking is a victory and political vindication for Ms Meloni, the populist Italian Prime Minister who will hold a breakout meeting of asylum hawks at the Brussels conference this week.

“It is a new, courageous, unprecedented path, but one that perfectly reflects the European spirit and that has everything it takes to be followed also with other non-EU nations,” Ms Meloni told the Italian Senate, hailing the opening of the centre in Albania.

Ms von der Leyen said the new Albanian procedure allowed the EU “to draw lessons from this experience in practice”.

The tipping point for the shift in Brussels was German and French support last week for an Austro-Dutch proposal demanding a “paradigm shift in the return process”, including “sanctions” for migrants who do not co-operate with deportation orders, which provided a new legal basis for the camps.

The International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian relief agency, has described Ms Meloni’s Albania model as a “dangerous political experiment [that] must never become a blueprint for the EU’s approach”.

However, Ms von der Leyen said: “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. Only around 20 per cent of third-country nationals ordered to leave have actually returned.

“The commission will present a new proposal for legislation that would define clear obligations of co-operation for the returnee, and effectively streamline the process of returns.”

Countries in the western Balkans, such as Serbia, are coming under pressure to host the return hubs in a trade-off for having their applications for EU membership fast-tracked.

Ms von der Leyen’s reversal of long-standing doctrine comes before what promises to be a difficult EU conference on migration, following Poland’s decision to suspend all asylum claims, the introduction of German border controls and demands for opt-outs from refugee rules from The Netherlands and Hungary.

The decision by Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, to temporarily suspend all asylum claims and seal the border with Belarus has alarmed the commission and other EU countries that fear the break-up of European asylum, migration and border policy. Mr Tusk has been warned by the commission that suspending asylum claims would be in breach of the EU’s liberal values.

THE TIMES