Commissioner for Human Rights@CommissionerHR
At @CEPS_thinktank IdeasLab’s panel on returns and externalisation, I explained how, while effective returns are necessary to maintain the integrity of the international protection system, states must fully adhere to international law. Particular care is necessary when states attempt to externalise return procedures. This is an area replete with human rights risks.
Based on global experience, I set out a few guardrails:
✅ Precaution: States must keep their eyes wide open to potential negative impacts on human rights, and act based on facts rather than false assumptions. The European Commission, as Guardian of the EU Treaties, has a key role to play in protecting asylum and other human rights.
✅ Transparency and accountability: Arrangements with partner countries must be treaty-based and publicly accessible—not informal handshakes.
✅ Human rights by design: Impact assessments, risk mitigation strategies and independent human rights monitoring must be hardwired into the system, not added as an afterthought.
✅ No responsibility shifting: States cannot abdicate their legal duty to honour the right to seek asylum through third-party arrangements.
✅ Avoid risk of refoulement: By ensuring adequate access to remedy, rather than rushed appeal processes with no suspensive effect.
✅ Respect the right to liberty: Locking people up is expensive, inefficient, and destroys the trust needed for successful policy. Alternatives to detention exist and should get priority.
✅ Refrain from transferring people to countries with which they have no connection, and from applying “safe country” concepts in ways that do not grant adequate value to individual circumstances.
We must stop 'sleepwalking' into legal and ethical crises. We cannot just wait for the courts to tell us that what is being discussed is unlawful. It’s time to move toward human rights compliance by design, learning from what has failed elsewhere to build what can work here.
#Migration #HumanRights #EUReturnsRegulation #RuleOfLaw #cepslab2026
