Findings & Recommendations

This page presents the key findings and policy recommendations emerging from the GAPs project on migrant returns and readmission. It highlights trends in return governance across Africa and the Middle East, identifies challenges to migrant protection, and outlines actionable measures for greater transparency, accountability, and rights-based return practices.

 

  • work on progress…

  • work on progress…

  • work on progress…

  • Key Findings:

    • Migration management in the African and Middle Eastern regions has shifted from initial solidarity and/or pragmatism to an increased focus on coercing return. This follows from the ever more protracted nature of displacement as well as the EU’s emphasis on externalization and containment.

    • Similar to practices in EU countries, regional host countries predominantly seek to return humanitarian migrants by creating push factors for self-return through irregularization and marginalization.

    • Return migration governance in the settings studied is often highly informal and opaque as a consequence of securitization. Overtly coercive forms of return (pushbacks and deportations) in particular are not monitored.

    • International organizations, often funded by the EU, play a fundamental role in providing the financial, legal, technological, institutional, and operational support that is necessary for assisted returns. Such capacities may also be used for deportation and pushbacks. There is thus a risk that European support for assisted return in regional host countries is repurposed for coerced return.

    • Current forms of return migration governance in the African and Middle Eastern regions often undermine migrant protection and erode the principle of non-refoulement. EU and member states can be complicit in this in the form of chain refoulement.

    Return migration governance has become a key agenda item and a key instrument of political leverage in international relations between regional host countries and the  EU.

    Policy Recommendations:

    1. Acknowledge the potential negative rippling effects of the EU’s focus on externalization and return for regional host countries in terms of intra-regional mobility.

    2. Be transparent about the EUs internal conflicts of interest between externalization of migration governance on one hand, and upholding the adherence to the Refugee- and Human Rights conventions.

    3. Prioritize protection over containment. Stop funding schemes and capacity building that in practice enable violations of refugee and human rights.

    Ensure the systematic independent monitoring of return practices and demand access of independent observers to return centers and border sites, and the systematic inclusion of the capacity and voice of migrant-led organizations in return planning and monitoring.

  • work on progress…

  • work on progress…

  • work on progress…

  • work on progress…

 

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