Britain spent £715 million on a plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. By June 2024, nobody had been forcibly relocated, and four people had gone voluntarily. That record hangs over Europe’s newest attempt to send rejected asylum seekers abroad.
Five EU countries, Greece, Germany, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands, are pressing ahead with “return hubs” outside the bloc, probably in Africa. They have agreed a common framework. The hubs would take people who have exhausted their legal options to stay in Europe and cannot be sent to their countries of origin. The push follows rules the EU approved this week that clear the way.
Timetables and destinations
“When it comes to return hubs, it’s progressing very well,” Danish Interior Minister Morten Bødskov told reporters on Thursday, according to AFP. “We are moving in the right direction.” He has said Denmark expects to be ready to transfer its first irregular migrants to a partner country outside the EU within 2027.
Greek Migration Minister Thanos Plevris told Politico that Greece expects a pilot project in the first half of next year.
No destination has been confirmed. Rwanda has been reported as a possible partner. A Greek government statement said the hubs would be set up in safe third countries, “particularly on the African continent.”
What the new rules allow
The EU rules create a bloc-wide legal framework for returns and let member states conclude bilateral or unilateral agreements with outside countries, with conditions. Any such deal may be made only with a country that respects international human rights standards and international law, including non-refoulement, the principle that no one may be sent back to a place where they would face torture, cruel or degrading treatment, or other irreparable harm.
The European Council set out the logic in a discussion paper in October 2025. Hubs, it said, could “incentivize voluntary returns,” since migrants who ignore a deportation order could face transfer to one. They might also discourage people with no valid asylum claim from making dangerous journeys to Europe.
The American example
The Trump administration has embraced third-country deportations. Internal US government documents show more than 100 deportees were sent to eight African countries over ten days in August, to places including Liberia, Rwanda, Eswatini and Sierra Leone. Plevris is an admirer. “I am a fan of President Trump,” he told Breitbart in August. “But if you ask me what was the best thing he did, it was change the migration policy of the USA, because now we have a new migration policy also in Europe.”
The British lesson
The UK Supreme Court ruled the Rwanda scheme unlawful in 2023, before it got going, citing the risk that refugees could end up returned to countries where they faced persecution. The Labour government formally abandoned it the following year.
Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, told CBS News that governments should expect litigation “even where the third country looks considerably less controversial than Rwanda.” Deterrence, he said, assumes enough people believe a transfer is realistic. “If only a very small proportion can be moved, the deterrent may be much less credible.” And: “externalization is not a shortcut around the difficult parts of migration policy.” It may shift the difficulties geographically, he said, but governments still face courts, individual rights, administrative capacity, uncooperative countries and substantial costs.
Critics on the right are not satisfied either. Jacob Reynolds of the Brussels think tank Freedom and Sovereignty Initiative Europe called the decision a “welcome step towards gaining control of our borders,” but warned that outsourcing the problem risks avoiding the lack of control over EU borders. Until the generous regimes available to asylum seekers change, he said, “the problem will not be solved.”
