Our statement following the adoption of the EU Deportation Regulation

Today, 17 June, the European Parliament voted in favor of the most far reaching and punitive deportation regime yet. The Deportation Law is framed as the final piece of the EU Pact of Migration, while in reality it is the latest move in a deeply alarming shift in EU migration policy. By aligning with far-right priorities, centre-right parties have enabled measures that mirror ICE-style deportations and will significantly expand surveillance, racial profiling, and the use of detention as a tool of control. 

Just days after the EU Pact came into force on June 12th, this law has been rushed through the Parliament based on a fake sense of urgency to speed up Deportations. In reality, the EU has spent years fortifying its borders and ensuring that no one can arrive to Europe safely: arrivals are at a record low while deaths in the Mediterranean and at landborders are at a record high, and more and more people on the move go missing following violent pushbacks. Meanwhile our work attempting to document violent pushbacks, deaths and disappearances is increasingly obstructed and criminalized. 

Aligning with the Pact's emphasis to speed up border procedures and allow for quick rejections of asylum applications, without a substantive examination of their merits, the deportation law further facilitates fast-track deportations without adequate procedural protections or full consideration of protection needs and risks of refoulement. While less physically violent and clandestine in character, the legalization of such administrative procedures seem to increasingly converge with pushback-like practices, producing similarly harmful consequences while operating within the “framework of EU legislation”. The new Deportation Law encourages home raids and seizure of personal belongings in order to enforce deportations, legitimizing racial profiling and the use of vaguely defined “investigative measures”. 

Moreover, the regulation also accelerates the outsourcing of border enforcement through cooperation with third countries, effectively allowing EU Member States to distance themselves from the violence carried out in their name. With this new deportation law, the EU is actively promoting the use of so-called “return hubs,” sending people to countries they have no connection to. Once criticised as ad hoc measures pursued by Member States, these deportation hubs are now becoming an EU-endorsed policy designed to remove people not only from European territory, but from public accountability.

What is intensifying is a system where violence, pushbacks, torture, deaths, and disappearances, is systematically hidden from public view. These abuses are increasingly outsourced to third countries or displaced into remote and hostile environments, enabling the EU to evade accountability. We are seeing a continuous normalization and institutionalization of border violence and an erosion of international law. Just because something is enacted into law does not mean that it is legal; on the contrary, it sets a dangerous precedent that erodes respect for the rule of law in the EU. 

This dynamic is already visible, as certain Member States have been emboldened to pursue increasingly restrictive detention and return policies that push — and in some cases overstep — rule-of-law boundaries.

For example, Greece has pre-empted - and already enacted - parts of proposed new deportation framework by tightening its domestic legislation: extending maximum detention periods up to 2 years, broadening the criteria for detention on the basis of an alleged “risk of absconding,” imposing more onerous obligations on individuals subject to return - including electronic monitoring, and narrowing access to procedural safeguards and effective remedies. Exacerbating the limitation of rights, the government has further reinforced the criminalisation of irregular stay, expanding the use of penal sentences for “illegal” entry, exit, or stay, the only way out of which is to agree to so-called “voluntary return”. Originally meant to allow individuals a limited window to depart on their own terms, without the need for coercive enforcement by the authorities, “voluntary return” has in this context been instrumentalised as a coercive tool to ensure departures where deportation might otherwise be delayed or difficult to enforce. 

In Bosnia and in Serbia, detention and returns are already being routinely used as part of migration management. With the focus already on readmissions from EU states and with the potential establishment of Return Hubs, individuals may face  widespread, prolonged detention in harmful conditions, including unaccompanied children and those with other specific vulnerabilities, with the lack of access to legal aid, medical care, or oversight, routinely violating international standards.

We join the call of We Keep Us Safe and civil society organizations across Europe to: 

• Resist on a national level, organize yourselves and protest locally 

• Empower migrant-led and migrant justice organizations locally and across Europe 

• Continue to document border violence and racialized injustice against racialized groups

• Resist the invisibilisation of harm and demand accountability

Signed by: 

Border Violence Monitoring Network 

Collective Aid 

Mobile Info Team 

I HAVE Rights