JOINT STATEMENT Over 200 Organisations Oppose EU’s Inhumane Proposal on Deportation
15 September 2025
On 11 March 2025, the European Commission presented a new proposal for a Return Regulation to replace the current Return Directive. Behind the euphemistic name, the proposal outlines coercive, traumatising, and rights-violating measures premised on an imperative of increasing deportation rates. Instead of focusing on protection, housing, healthcare and education, the Regulation is premised on punitive policies, detention centres, deportation and enforcement. The “Deportation Regulation,” as it would be more aptly called, is part of a broader shift in EU migration policy to characterise human movement as a threat to justify derogations from fundamental rights guarantees. EU institutions and Member States have increasingly made criminalisation, surveillance, and discrimination the default tools of migration governance – as opposed to protection, safety, social inclusion measures, the expansion of safe and regular routes and rights based residence permits. Our organisations are unequivocal: this Regulation must be rejected. It is driven by detention, deportation, externalisation, and punishment, particularly of racialised people, and will result in more people being pushed into legal limbo and dangerous conditions. We call on the European Commission to withdraw the proposal and urge the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union to reject it in its current form. The Regulation must be rejected for the following reasons: 1. DEPORTATIONS TO COUNTRIES WITH NO PRIOR TIES AND OFFSHORE DEPORTATION CENTRES
(Arts. 4, 17) This proposal – together with proposed changes to the Asylum Procedures Regulation – would make it possible, for the first time, to deport a person against their will to a non-EU country to which they have no personal connection, either through which they have only briefly transited, or in which they have never set foot. Sending someone against their will to a country to which they have no link can in no way be considered reasonable, just, or sustainable. Such measures would tear apart families and communities across Europe, undermining the fabric of solidarity that people rely on to live with dignity. Expanding the options for "return" raises serious concerns about fundamental rights, including the risk of people being stranded in third countries, the safety and dignity of removal, the sustainability of inclusion and reintegration, and access to support, rights, and services. Such measures also apply to families and children, with limited exceptions. The proposed Regulation also enables the establishment of so-called “return hubs”; highly likely to become prison-like detention centres hosting those awaiting deportations, outside of EU territory. This is