EU to discuss Rwanda-style asylum centres across Europe

Offshore hubs hot topic as interior ministers of 27 member states meet in Luxembourg this week

European countries have ordered Brussels to investigate the feasibility of Rwanda-style offshore processing centres for asylum seekers ahead of an EU summit set to be dominated by migration next week.
The European Commission was told to work on proposals by the gathered interior ministers of the 27 member states at a meeting in Luxembourg.
“Offshore hubs were widely mentioned as the most feasible innovative solution currently on the table,” an EU diplomat told The Telegraph.
“So the commission is now tasked to work on them. Quite a big step forward,” the source said before confirming the hubs would be on the agenda of the leaders’ talks in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.
It comes as Italy is set to open Europe’s first off-shore processing centre in Albania on Monday.
A few months ago, the EU adopted a sweeping reform of its asylum policies, hardening border procedures and compelling countries to take in refugees from under-pressure states or pay €20,000 (£16,700) for each they reject.
The long-negotiated package, which will come into force in June 2026, does not go far enough, more than half of the EU’s 27 member states have said.
It is a significant shift for Brussels. In 2018, the Commission ruled out offshore hubs, branding them neither “desirable nor feasible”.
It’s also a victory for Viktor Orban – a long-term fan of the UK’s Rwanda plan – who declared such “immigration hotspots” to be “the only solution” to illegal migrations and boosting deportations in a speech to the European Parliament on Wednesday.
“Any other solutions are an illusion,” the fiercely anti-migrant prime minister of Hungary told MEPs in Strasbourg.
Left-wing MEPs erupted into the anti-fascist song Bella Ciao, which earned them a gentle rebuke from European Parliament president Roberta Metsola who said: “This is not the Eurovision.”
But on migration, the sands were already shifting in Mr Orban’s direction.
Few in Europe compare the offshore processing of migrants to Britain’s ditched Rwanda plan because of its rejection by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
Instead they prefer the euphemism of “immigration hotspots” or evoke Italy’s similar and apparently ECHR-compliant migrant deal with Albania. Unlike the Rwanda plan, these hubs leave open the possibility of a successful asylum seeker living in the destination country.
At least 16 interior ministers were determined to get “innovative solutions” such as the offshore hubs onto the EU policy-making agenda, despite ethical and legal concerns that have stopped similar efforts in the past.
“We must not rule out any solution”, France’s new and hardline interior minister Bruno Retailleau said as he arrived for the meeting.
One potential option was asking EU membership candidates to host the hubs, a diplomatic source said.
Albania is one such candidate country. It has agreed to host “Italian” migrants but ruled out similar deals with other countries. Western Balkan countries hoping to join the bloc, such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia, were also discussed.
Existing EU deals with countries such as Tunisia, Turkey and Libya, which swap funding in exchange for curbing migrant crossings, have been controversial.
In Luxembourg, Germany’s interior minister Nancy Fraser said reform had to go hand in hand with “possible agreements” with third countries.
But she admitted that finding a “partner state” for an Albania-style centre was the hardest issue to resolve.
Non-governmental organisations are predictably outraged. Groups like Amnesty EU, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and many others have strongly criticised the plans.
Migration remains probably the most divisive issue in the EU, with countries accusing each other of refusing to share the burden.
Next week’s summit, which will be held less than a week after Albania’s migrant centres opened for business, was expected to be hard fought.
“I’m not sure how big a fight there will be,” one EU diplomat said. “There’s quite a wide group that wants to explore this.”
Frontex, the EU’s border agency, says irregular border crossings fell by 39 per cent to almost 140,000 in the first eight months of 2024, compared to the same period last year.
EU countries plus Norway and Switzerland received 85,000 asylum applications in May, down by a third compared to a peak reached last autumn, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum.
Attitudes on migration have unquestionably hardened.
On Saturday Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland, said it would suspend the right to asylum on its soil. A critic of EU migration policy, he vowed to demand the EU accept his decision at the summit to head off legal issues from the ban.
“The EU is trapped in a vicious cycle of bad migration policy, and migration is very much Europe’s albatross,” said Tarek Megerisi, of the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
“Member states continue doubling down on policies to externalise Europe’s borders to outside the bloc, despite these policies having limited efficacy and actually driving migration further into illicit channels and into the hands of criminal gangs,” he said.
“The fixation on externalisation policies, despite their inefficacy, looks set to deepen under the new commission. Given there’s no reason why they’ll suddenly start working now, migration could very well eventually lead to the end of Schengen and become the force that undoes much of the EU’s progress towards a closer Europe.”
Denmark this week announced it would reintroduce temporary border controls in another blow to the bloc’s Schengen Zone of passport-free movement.
Copenhagen’s move on security grounds made it the seventh EU member state to tighten their frontiers. Others include France, Italy, Austria and Sweden.
Germany, whose former chancellor Angela Merkel threw open its borders to more than a million Syrians during the migrant crisis, reintroduced controls after the terror attack in Solingen.
The hard and far-Right’s success is dragging traditional parties further to the Right on migration.
Far-Right parties have won general elections in Austria and the Netherlands and state elections in Germany and posted strong results in the European elections.
“Pressure will no doubt continue to mount in the upcoming months on the European Commission,” said Alberto-Horst Neidhardt, of the European Policy Centre think tank in Brussels.
He said that EU governments risked “fanning the flames of extremism” by “forcibly putting migration back at the top of the EU agenda”.
“By exploring what are often defined as ‘innovative solutions’ such as offshoring, they are normalising the political agenda of the far Right, and validating the talking points of the far-Left,” he added.