{"id":86998,"date":"2026-03-06T10:06:47","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T10:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/dealbreaker-how-eu-asylum-policy-is-changing\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T10:07:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T10:07:20","slug":"ausschlusskriterium-wie-sich-die-eu-asylpolitik-verandert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/ausschlusskriterium-wie-sich-die-eu-asylpolitik-verandert\/","title":{"rendered":"Ausschlusskriterium: Wie sich die EU-Asylpolitik ver\u00e4ndert"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 2023, Italy and Albania – an EU candidate country not currently part of the Union – came to an understanding. For years, the two countries\u2019 coast guards had plucked people from the Adriatic sea. They would become international protection applicants who\u2019d made the potentially lethal crossing, hoping to be granted asylum on Italian soil. The question of who ought to take responsibility for these desperate individuals had long raised tensions between the two countries. Now things were going to be different. Prime Ministers Edi Rama and Giorgia Meloni held up their signed agreements and shook hands, smiling as <\/span>cameras flashed.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the original agreement<\/span><\/a>, detention centres would be built on Albanian soil: in those centres, refugees rescued from the sea attempting a water crossing into Italy would be detained – even those rescued in Italian search-and-rescue jurisdictions. Although they would be Albania\u2019s responsibility in a material sense, the detention centres would fall under Italian jurisdiction, meaning the legal responsibility for processing the asylum claims would still be Italy\u2019s. This approach isn\u2019t unique: it\u2019s been attempted in various forms across the world and is sometimes called \u201cexternalisation\u201d. The Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja <\/span>Mijatovi\u0107 called the Memorandum an \u201cad hoc extra-territorial asylum regime\u201d and part of a \u201cworrying European <\/span>trend\u201d.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt plays into the bigger role of what non-EU European countries do for the EU, and how they\u2019re treated,\u201d explained journalist Sara <\/span>\u010cu<\/span>ri\u0107<\/span>. Living and working in the Balkans as a political correspondent for a number of years, she saw national governments rife with corruption, \u201cgrasping at straws\u201d to access funding, while emigration to the more prosperous West led to a vicious cycle of brain drain. In that context, an EU country \u201csending their migrants into a lower income country\u201d had always rubbed <\/span>\u010cu<\/span>ri\u0107<\/span> the wrong way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Albania\u2019s GDP in 2024 was valued at a little over 27 million USD; Italian GDP was over 2.3 billion <\/span>that same year<\/span><\/a>. With that wealth would come – presumably – the resources to set up and administer their own detention centres. Instead, the Italian state budgeted 650 million euros for the transfer of 36,000 detainees to Albania. The Memorandum was criticised for its encroachment on Albanian sovereignty, its general impracticability, and its potential to lead to <\/span>human rights violations<\/span><\/a>; nonetheless, externalisation continued.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Balkan workers come to the EU, there\u2019s a very specific attitude towards them\u2026 they\u2019re seen as less,\u201d she said. \u201cConsidering that so many Balkan people are leaving for the EU because of money and the living standard, that ties into the whole thing\u2026 all the countries here [in the Balkans] see the EU as a grand savior.\u201d Even if Albanian ascendancy into the EU was never explicitly referenced as a benefit of entering the original agreement with Italy, it\u2019s hard to separate policies like this from that wider economic context. The relationship between countries like Albania and Italy, or Greece and North Macedonia, is fundamentally imbalanced; that won\u2019t change for as long as one half of the negotiating parties is part of a very exclusive, and very wealthy, club. \u201cBeing part of the EU is a dream for all the countries here,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Externalisation: A Hard Bargain<\/strong><\/h2>\n

From the perspective of the Balkan public, this was piling more weight on an infrastructure already close to buckling under the weight of skyrocketing land crossings. \u201cUsing another country\u2019s resources to make European countries\u2019 situation easier never sat quite right with me,\u201d <\/span>\u010curi\u0107 said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although the Albanian premier <\/span>rejected <\/span><\/a>suggestions that he might broker similar deals with other states – <\/span>claiming<\/span><\/a> the country had been asked by others – other countries have attempted similar schemes to off-shore responsibility onto states with objectively less resources.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2022, Conservative PM Boris Johnson and Rwandan foreign minister Vincent Biruta\u00a0 brokered a deal<\/span>: asylum seekers whose claims had been rejected would be flown to resettle in Rwanda, regardless of their country of origin. This was swiftly deemed<\/span> incompatible with international law<\/span><\/a> by the UK\u2019s Supreme Court, since the UK government couldn\u2019t guarantee sufficient safety to the people they sent there. Of course, this was all hypothetical., no scheduled flights taking applicants to Rwanda ever left British soil. The now-scrapped plan led to a grand total of four voluntary resettlements in Rwanda, at a total estimated cost of 240 million pounds to the UK taxpayer. (To make this whole story even more of a resounding failure, the Rwandan government have recently begun proceedings to <\/span>sue<\/span><\/a> the British government for failing to pay them the resettlement funding they were promised.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The Rwanda-UK deal reveals the goal of these deportation schemes isn\u2019t necessarily more efficient processing. Given the massive cost-inefficiency of the scheme and the increasing xenophobic sentiment among the British public at the same time the Rwanda-UK deal was first announced in 2022,\u00a0 the whole proposal seems to have been more of a political stunt to appease potential voters than anything else. The gleeful way that conservative politicians announced migrants would be \u201csent to Rwanda\u201d is perhaps a clue to the real purpose of the scheme, punishing few to deter many.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Human Rights and \u201cSafety\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n

So how can such actions be justified under international law? <\/span>Though there\u2019s no real way to force a country to take asylum seekers, membership of the EU connotes that countries will uphold certain democratic and humanitarian standards. Article 18 of the <\/span>Charter <\/span><\/a>of Fundamental Rights of the European Union guarantees the right to asylum. In May 2024, the European Parliament issued a <\/span>Directive<\/span><\/a> requiring member states to \u201cprovide an adequate standard of living for applicants for international protection\u201d. The EU Court of Human Rights is a body that decides whether or not member states are doing enough to protect these abstract rights; it would be this court who decided whether Italy was – by holding people in what are essentially prisons in Albania – providing them with an \u201cadequate standard of living\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the key source of tension between European higher courts and member states over the last few years hasn\u2019t been to do with the material treatment of asylum seekers, but on a different topic altogether – a topic that, in 2026, the EU seems determined to iron out for the final time. That\u2019s \u201c<\/span>safe countries<\/span><\/a>\u201d: the list of other countries across the world that the EU deems safe enough for a refugee to return to or move to. If you come from a safe country of origin, it\u2019s on you to prove that you can\u2019t go back, and it\u2019s very unlikely that your application for asylum will be approved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For a long time, member states clashed with higher courts about what could count as a \u201csafe country of origin\u201d, allowing them to dismiss a claim for asylum. For instance, <\/span>in 2025<\/span><\/a>, the European Court of Justice says that Italy could not declare Bangladesh a safe country of origin because certain vulnerable groups aren\u2019t \u201csafe\u201d there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, it still looks like a battle that member states have won in the end. The much-heralded EU Asylum Pact is lengthy, and complicated, but most of its promises look like acquisitions to member states that have long complained they\u2019re doing more than their fair share when it comes to processing and taking in refugees. The <\/span>European Parliament<\/span><\/a> has created a new \u201csafe countries of origin\u201d list which includes <\/span>Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Kosovo, India, Morocco and Tunisia.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, they\u2019ve promised to roll out new policy surrounding the list. Countries will be able to declare that an international protection applicant is not their responsibility without even having to examine their application; one of the reasons they can use to justify this decision is whether the applicant has a connection to one of these \u201csafe countries\u201d. This connection could be as tenuous as a family member having a pending application for that country – even if they haven\u2019t yet been offered asylum there, even if you yourself have never been to that country, you can still be turned away and told to go join them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The new EU Asylum Pact matters because it reflects a marked shift in European attitudes towards refugees; it would also make it a lot easier for member states to attempt responsibility-shifting schemes like in Albania and Rwanda.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Future of Asylum in Europe<\/strong><\/h2>\n

These externalisation processes raise important questions that continue to go unanswered. For instance: the Italy-Albania transfer policy will only apply to applicants from countries deemed \u201csafe\u201d, and pregnant women, children and \u201cother vulnerable individuals\u201d; but human rights organisations have <\/span>raised alarms<\/span><\/a> that there\u2019s no clarification as to how those provisions will be made, verified or enforced. The EU-Turkiye deal <\/span>first signed in 2016<\/span><\/a> would go on to trap thousands of asylum seekers in a legal limbo on Greek islands after their claims were rejected.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The UK-Rwanda deal was a failure on every financial and logistical level, and was derided as a \u201cpointless exercise in performative cruelty\u201d by <\/span>one public health expert.\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

So where do we go from here? The stated goal of the Pact might be uniformity and efficiency, but it also clearly is designed to give member states more free reign to engage in future transfer schemes. The fact that the Pact will \u201coblige member states to establish a mechanism to monitor fundamental rights in relation to the border procedure\u201d is, frankly, small comfort – considering the general failure of member states to uphold their responsibilities to asylum seekers even on the most basic levels like <\/span>housing<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to separate asylum policy from wider power relationships between states. We\u2019re fast approaching a world where EU citizens get to enjoy the benefits of this off-shoring, blissfully unaware of the real cost – not only to our neighbour states, but asylum seekers themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2023, Italy and Albania – an EU candidate country not currently part of the Union – came to an understanding. For years, the two countries\u2019 coast guards had plucked people from the Adriatic sea. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2492,"featured_media":86835,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[2578,2842,25689],"post_formats":[645],"coauthors":[21302],"class_list":["post-86998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-allgemein","tag-asylum-de","tag-eu-migration-pact-de","tag-refugee","post_formats-artikel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2492"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86998"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87005,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86998\/revisions\/87005"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86998"},{"taxonomy":"post_formats","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_formats?post=86998"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pulse-z.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=86998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}