The European Commission announced today its new “Return Regulation”, setting out a ‘common European approach’ to deportations. 

Following the proposed Facilitator’s Package criminalisation of migration, the Commission has now moved to centralise EU Member States’ deportations of third-country nationals, scaling and speeding up the rate of so-called ‘returns’.

The proposal uses “efficiency” and “innovation” to disguise an insidious new approach that increases racial profiling and surveillance to ‘detect’ migrants, promotes off-shore detention centres that already face legal challenges, and even allows child detention.  

The draft law is another brick in Fortress Europe’s inhumane and punitive approach to human movement. 

The proposal: 

• Extends the criminal law framework to migration: adding national governments’ ‘duty’ to detect migrants, increasing surveillance and racial profiling
• Creates a framework of EU government ‘cooperation’ on deportations, through a new ‘European Return Order’ and future database to facilitate deportations
• Expands the detention regime by increasing maximum timelines to 24 months, and failing to exempt children
• Expands the grounds for deportation: including refusal to ‘cooperate’ and posing a security risk even when no crime has been committed
• Increasing punishments imposed on migrants in addition to deportation, including entry bans, the denial of benefits, and fines
• Paves the way for EU governments to build offshore deportation prisons (‘return hubs’). 

In resisting the far-right surge in EU migration policy – language matters. To effectively resist the incorporation of far-right and discriminatory logic in migration policy, we must counter the use of bureaucratic language to neutralise the violence of the EU’s deportation regime.

Quotes:

“We urge the EU to stop treating migrants as criminals. Migration is a social phenomenon, not a crime. We must protect lives, not punish those seeking safety and dignity.”

Adla Shashati – Director, Greek Forum of Migrants

“Neutrally phrased as a law on “returns”, the EU is proposing an expanded deportation regime, including the resort to more prison-like detention centres (“return hubs”), more racialised policing and surveillance, and a range of new punishment-based deportation responses, including fines and the withdrawal of benefits.

This new law is part of a much longer trajectory of punitive migration policies, developing a fully fledged criminal response to migration.“

Sarah Chander – Director, Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice 

“The proposal will only worsen the EU’s flawed migration policies, subjecting vulnerable people to further harm, legal uncertainty, and unjust detention, rather than upholding their rights and dignity under international law. History has shown that scaling up detention leads to serious human rights violations, jeopardising lives for political gain and reinforcing the EU’s focus on deportation over protection.”

Jennifer Kamau, Co-founder, International Women* Space