On Monday 27 October, the Member States will be debating the arrangements for setting up return hubs in third countries for people whose applications for protection in the EU have been rejected and who are subject to a return decision.
While the Member States’ interior ministers discussed the mandatory mutual recognition of national decisions on 14 October in Luxembourg (see EUROPE 13730/2), this time the national experts will be asked to take a position on the famous ‘hubs’ that allow people to be transferred to third countries pending their return to their country of origin or as a final destination.
According to a note from the Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU, the experts will be asked to answer two questions. The first: could return hubs be created not only as a Member State initiative (as The Hague has just done with Uganda) but also as an EU initiative?
“A significant number of Member States have requested this. The Commission has already explained that, in its view, the proposal for a regulation on return does not prevent this last option”, explains the Presidency.
The second question would be “whether return hubs could be established both as a final destination and as agreements or arrangements that involve onward return of third country nationals to e.g. their countries of origin”.
Already initiated in 2024 by some fifteen Member States, now more numerous, “would not only offer a way out for Member States where the country of origin or returnee, or both, are not cooperating, but should also incentivise voluntary returns, as those not cooperating would face the alternative of being returned to a return hub”, says the Presidency. Return hubs “could also act as an important deterrent by discouraging people, with no asylum motive, from undertaking perilous journeys to reach the EU”.
Where a return hub would serve as a final destination, without subsequent return, the following elements should be specified in an agreement or arrangement establishing a return hub, the note suggests: “a) the procedures applicable to the return of illegally staying third-country nationals from the territory of the Member States to the third country; b) the conditions for the stay of the third-country national in the third country; c) the obligations of the third country; d) the consequences to be drawn in case of violations of the agreement or arrangement”.
Where a return hub involves subsequent return from the third country to the country of origin, the following elements should be specified: “a) the consequences in case onward return is not possible; b) the obligations and responsibilities of the Member State or the EU and of the third country; c) the consequences in case of significant change adversely impacting the situation of the third country; d) an independent body or mechanism to monitor the effective application of the agreement or arrangement”.
The Presidency also points out that “many Member States expressed that only unaccompanied minors should be exempted from being returned to a return hub”, as its first compromise had suggested (see EUROPE 13715/7). The exemption granted to families with minors in the Commission’s proposal is no longer included in the Danish note.
The Presidency would therefore like confirmation of support for maintaining this targeted exemption for unaccompanied minors in the compromise proposal. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)