After years of negotiations, the EU has adopted the Pact on Migration and Asylum, and recently concluded migration partnerships with Tunisia, Mauritania and Egypt.
While the Pact addresses internal migration rules within the Union, in practice the focus seems to be shifting towards the external dimension of migration.
The security situation in Europe reinforces the need to build stronger partnerships. The aim is not to push the countries from which people most often migrate to Europe into partnerships with countries that may ally themselves against Europe, for example by instrumentalising migration.
Even before the European Parliament elections, EU member states and political groups started to push the idea of transferring the asylum procedure to third countries. This was notably stated in a letter sent to the Commission in May 2024, signed by 15 member states.
Examples of the externalisation of asylum procedures include the outsourced Rwanda model eventually abandoned by the UK, the offshoring model being implemented in Albania by Italy, and the proposed return hub model, whereby rejected asylum-seekers would be transferred to a third country if they cannot be directly returned to their countries of origin.
