Aller à la navigation Aller au contenu

Press review April 2025

 Algeria

The Algerian authorities have returned more than 1,800 people on the move without right of residence to the border town of Assamaka (Niger), bringing to 4,000 the number of people pushed back during the month of April. However, these figures only take into account people registered on the Niger side: they could therefore be higher if they included people pushed back who immediately left for northern Algeria. A few weeks earlier, the Niger authorities had already protested against the violent nature of the refoulements attributed to Algeria, summoning the Algerian ambassador to Niamey [1] . A readmission agreement is said to exist between the two countries, although it has never been made public [2] : it is uncertain whether the refoulements of Nigeriens by Algeria are carried out within this framework.

The migrants targeted by these refoulements were reportedly detained before being taken by bus to ’Point Zero’, an isolated area in the desert where the authorities usually abandon people on the move they push back, without food or water and some fifteen kilometres from Assamaka [3] . Algeria is perpetuating a model that has already been tried and tested, since more than 30,000 migrants had already been expelled by 2024 [4] . This system is in line with the policies implemented by its Tunisian neighbour, which is pushing back many sub-Saharan migrants to Algeria (or Libya [5]) with support from the EU and its Member States [6]. Algeria, put under pressure by the Tunisian refoulements, and strengthened by the support given by Europe to its neighbour without consideration for rights violations, is thus taking advantage of the situation. Although it is financially independent of the EU, it serves its objectives by keeping more and more people on the move away from Europe’s borders.

 Egypt

The ministerial conference of the Khartoum Process was held in Cairo on 9 April 2025: at the end of this meeting, the ministers responsible for migration in each of the process’ member states, as well as senior officials from the EU and the African Union, agreed on a joint declarationand an action plan. The Khartoum Process is a ’platform for political cooperation’ between countries on the migration route from the Horn of Africa to Europe. Established in 2014, its aim is to provide a forum for dialogue between its members, in order to identify and implement projects to combat human trafficking and ’migrant smuggling’, in collaboration between ’countries of origin, transit and destination’.

Apart from the irony of some of the agreed elements in the published documents (mention of an objective of ’respect for the dignity and human rights of all migrants’ at a time when Egypt, the event’s host country, is preparing, with the unofficial support of the EU [7], to tighten its asylum policy), the general thrust of these texts is worrying. The Member States are committed to strengthening their cooperation in ’preventing and reducing irregular migration’, while restricting so-called regular migration channels to those that already exist, condemning people on the move taking this route to being blocked and having their rights violated (as is the case, for example, with Sudanese refugees in Egypt [8]). Deterring any plans to migrate is also a key priority, with the promotion of ’information campaigns’ on the ’risks of irregular migration’ (risks that are nonetheless maintained by the repressive policies of the EU and its members [9]), as well as an entire field of actions aimed at making more effective expulsions from the process’ member states.

 Mauritania

Mauritania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohamed Salem Ould Merzoug, announced on 10 April 2025 that more than 100 bodies of migrants had been recovered off the coast of Mauritania since the beginning of the year. In 2024, this figure had risen to 500: shipwrecks during attempted crossings to the Canary Islands are therefore continuing at high levels, even though Frontex has recordeda 30% drop in so-called ’irregular’ arrivals on this route in the first quarter of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024

These figures illustrate the fact that the objectives of ’preventing irregular migration’ and ’combating migrant smuggling’ - which motivate EU-Mauritania migration cooperation [10] - are achieved at the cost of migrants’ lives. The fall in the number of people arriving in Europe is linked to a tighter control of the African coastline [11] (resulting from material, financial and technical investment by the EU and its Member States), and to the operations carried out by the authorities [12] to push back people on the move, which conveniently serve European interests. However, the emphasis placed on ’irregular migration’ – rather than on protecting the lives and rights of people taking this route – only makes them more dangerous: United Against Refugee Deaths recorded83 deaths at sea on the route linking Mauritania to the Canaries over the same period in 2024. The EU-Mauritania partnership is here replicating the Tunisian ’model’: manufacturing ’buffer zones’ where People on the move seeking to reach Europe are kept in fear of expulsion [13], exposed to violence [14], deprived of means of subsistence [15], prevented from continuing their journey, and, ultimately, forced to abandon their migration project - by force or through ’voluntary return’ programmes implemented by the IOM and funded by the EU [16].

 Tunisia

At the beginning of April, Tunisia launched a vast and violent campaign to ’dismantle’ the informal settlements where thousands of people on the move were living in the province of Sfax, bulldozing and setting fire to goods (including food and medical supplies [17]). Tunisian leaders explained that their aim was to increase the ’voluntary return’ of people on the move present in Tunisia [18].

Exposed to racism and violence, which the authorities willingly exacerbate and exploit, people on the move in transit through the country have found their attempts to cross to the EU considerably hampered since Tunisia signed a memorandum of understandingwith the EU and agreed, in return for financial compensation, to introduce strict control of its external borders. Faced with such a blocking situation, migrants in Tunisia are more likely to ’accept’ an expulsion disguised as a ’voluntary return’ – and financed by the EU and its Member States [19]. This strategy seems to be ’bearing fruit’, given the long queues reported outside IOM offices. However, the processing times (several months) give cause for concern about the short and medium-term living conditions of People on the move, who are deprived of shelter and access to food, prevented from receiving money or working [20], and even detained for opposing the ’dismantling’ operations [21]. These policies are following the spirit of the Memorandum of Understanding, in which ’Tunisia reiterates its position that it will not be a country of settlement for irregular migrants’. The actions of the Tunisian authorities bear witness to the fact that this position seems to take precedence over respect for migrants’ rights. Despite the many accusations of rights violations levelled against Tunisia, the EU and its Member States have not called into question the partnership established with Tunis. The ineffectiveness of the ’sophisticated rights monitoring system’ invoked to justify it [22] has not prevented the European Commission from proposing that Tunisia be considered a ’safe country of origin’ [23].

 Germany

Friedrich Merz, who is due to become Germany’s official chancellor on 6 May, has declared that his country should limit the number of asylum seekers entering the country to less than 100,000 a year, justifying his position by public services being ’saturated’ by migrants. The number of asylum applications in Germany in 2024 (229,000) was already 30% lower than in 2023, and the future Chancellor intends to halve this figure.

The CDU-SPD coalition seems prepared to do anything to achieve this, with far more regard for its political longevity and the far-right’s demands than for respect for international law. While such numerical targets contravene the very principle of an individual and inalienable right to asylum, the coalition is also considering refoulement at its land borders, invoking Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which it interprets as an ’emergency clause’ allowing Member States to derogate from European rules within the area of freedom, security and justice, in the exercise of their responsibilities for ’maintaining public order and safeguarding national security’. However, the Court of Justice of the European Union has adopted a strict interpretation of this article: according to established case law [24], a State may derogate from EU law on the basis of Article 72 TFEU only if it can prove that the measures taken are necessary to maintain public order and national security, which cannot be left to the unilateral discretion of the State in question.

 Belgium

Since February, the Dutch courts have been refusing to send asylum seekers back to Belgium under the Dublin Regulation, on the grounds that the conditions required to guarantee asylum seekers a dignified reception in Belgium have not been met. Belgian accommodation facilities are saturated, and single men seeking protection find themselves, since a decision in 2021 [25], on waiting lists for several months before obtaining a place – a situation denounced by many NGOs [26].

The saturation of Belgian accommodation centres is nothing new: in June 2023, a group of MEPs pointed outto the European Commission that the European Court of Human Rights had ordered Belgium to take provisional measures in this area on numerous occasions (in 1,350 cases between October 2022 and April 2023 [27]), and that the national courts had condemned the Belgian State for its inaction in this area in more than 6,700 decisions. Belgium was criticised in a letterin 2022 by the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, and in the responsefrom its Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, the Belgian government gave assurances that it was taking steps to remedy these shortcomings. Two years on, this unchanged situation illustrates the impunity with which Belgium violates its obligation to provide accommodation for asylum seekers.

 Italy

Italy carried out the first deportation from its territory of a Bangladeshi national who had been detained in the Gjäder camp, recently converted into an Italian detention centre (CPR) [28]. In addition to the many concerns that the migration arrangement between Italy and Albania continues to raise regarding respect for the rights of people transferred to the Gjäder and Shengjin camps [29], this expulsion proved to be more costly and slower than from a CPR on Italian soil.

Even if it had been ’cost-effective’ or faster than from Italy, this externalised procedure would have continued to entail a significant risk of rights violations: now, it also illustrates the falsity of the Meloni government’s arguments. While claiming to speed up the processing of asylum applications (by extending the accelerated procedure at the border to both camps), it only achieved to set up a externalised CPR, which makes deportations more complex and more costly, with no regard for rights. Yet this is the type of externalisation proposed by the European Commission through the introduction of extraterritorial expulsion platforms (’return hubs’) into European law [30]. At the same time, the Italian courts continue to remind the government of its obligations: on 19 April, the Court of Appeal in Rome ruled that neither the Italy-Albania protocol nor the decree-law of 28 March 2025 extending the use of Albanian camps to CPR authorise the detention of asylum seekers in Albania under the ordinary normal, who must therefore – if they are not under an accelerated procedure at the border, currently blocked pending a decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union – be transferred back to Italy [31]

The Advocate General’s Opinionin cases C-758/24 and C-759/24 before the Court of Justice of the EU has been published. The Advocate General recommends that the Court interpret the concept of ’safe country of origin’ – as defined in Directive 2013/32, which is in force until June 2026 – as allowing a Member State to place asylum seekers from these (presumed safe) countries of origin under the accelerated procedure, even if they are not considered safe for certain categories of persons – provided, however, that these same categories are not subject to the accelerated procedure. In the Advocate General’s view, restricting the qualification of ’safe country of origin’ to countries where such safety can be presumed for the entire population would be tantamount to ’depriving the concept of safe country of origin of part of its useful effect’: In his view, this interpretation ’would have the disadvantage of excluding from national lists of safe countries of origin countries which guarantee [...] the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights and freedoms, but which still fail in their mission with regard to one or more limited and identifiable categories of people’. It is clear, therefore, that this reasoning gives priority to the pragmatism of ’useful’ expeditious processing of asylum applications over the protection of applicants from persecution in their countries of origin. Furthermore, the Advocate General is of the opinion that the ’safe countries of origin’ listed by the executive should be based on information made available to the court responsible for examining a potential appeal, without which the court should be authorised to gather its own information, in accordance with the criteria set out in the directive.

In other words, if the Court decides to give judgment in accordance with the Advocate General’s recommendations (which the Advocate General describes as a ’pragmatic solution’ based ’on the economy and purpose of the system in which this concept is embedded’, in an eloquent choice of words), Italy will be able to designate third countries as ’safe countries of origin’ for their general population, with the exception of certain categories of people, and place asylum seekers from these countries in its camps in Albania – unless they are part of the population categories for which this country is not safe. As the placement of a country on the Italian list of ’safe countries of origin’ is not accompanied by the sources used by the government to take this decision, Italian courts would be authorised to gather their own information in order to judge its compliance with the conditions provided by EU law.

The Italian government has announced a €20 million investment in a ’voluntary returns’ programme to be implemented in Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, in cooperation with the IOM. The aim of the programme is to achieve the ’voluntary repatriation’ of around 3,300 People on the move in these countries to their countries of origin.

The supposedly voluntary nature of such returns is an illusion: a profusion of reports document the rights violations committed against people on the move in these three countries, and the choice to return to one’s country of origin can hardly be considered free under these conditions. Rather than denouncing or seeking to put an end to these violations (inhuman or degrading treatment, forced labour, arbitrary detention, refoulement, forced disappearances, abductions, etc.), Italy prefers – like the EU and other Member States [32] – to fund programmes aimed at giving migrants living in or transiting through one of these countries the illusion of a choice between staying there (and risking death or the rights violations) and ’consenting’ to a disguised deportation, accompanied by a financial incentive.

 Finland

The Finnish Ministry of the Interior has announcedthe renewal of its decision to close its border with Russia, effective since 15 December 2023. While admitting that ’instrumentalisation of migration has ceased for now’, the Finnish authorities believe that the risk of it ’resuming and spreading, as seen previously, remains likely’ and that ’if the phenomenon were to continue, it would pose a serious threat to Finland’s national security and public order’. This decision is accompanied by the extension of the ’centralisation of applications for international protection’ at three border crossing points (islands or border ports accessible from the Baltic Sea): on the rest of the Russian Finnish border, no asylum applications are registered and anyone crossing the border is pushed back towards Russia.

Since 2023, the eastern EU countries have accused Russia and Belarus of facilitating the entry of migrants into their territories and then encouraging their passage to the EU in order to ’destabilise’ the EU and its members. Finland is taking advantage of this situation to justify, like Poland [33], restrictions on the right of asylum at its eastern border, in complete violation of international law. The Border Security Actof 2024 introduced the possibility for the government to order the refusal to register any asylum application at a specific border, and to push back any asylum seeker who (supposedly) entered Finnish territory via that border. Finland and Poland benefit from the proactive support of the European Commission, which provides them with legal arguments to defend these measures and turns a blind eye to their failure to comply with EU asylum law. Although the Commission is empowered to initiate infringement proceedings against an EU Member State, it remains very permissive towards them in the area of asylum law. Only 20 proceedingshave been initiated since 2009, of which three (all against Hungary) have resulted in referral to the CJEU and a conviction. The Council’s Commissioner for Human Rights has expressedher ’concerns’ since 2022. To date, however, no proceedings have been initiated against Finland in this area.

 Greece

On 3 April 2025, an inflatable boat carrying 31 people on the move, who had departed from Turkey, sank off the island of Lesbos: seven people lost their lives and one young girl is still missing. The circumstances of the accident are unclear: the boat sank in the presence of a Greek coastguard vessel, which one of the survivors accuses of having generated dangerous waves around the dinghy, causing it to sink, instead of directly rescuing the people on board. The coastguard is also said to have used hooks to winch the dinghy back into Turkish waters [34], which would have amounted to a refoulement; the remains of the dinghy seem to indicate that its wooden floor was violently detached, a fact that is incompatible with the effects of the waves alone.

Despite the grey areas in this case, the Greek authorities are continuing their strategy of criminalising people on the move: the Afghan survivor who denounced the coastguards’ course of actions, and who lost his wife and daughter in the shipwreck, is accused of being a ’trafficker’ because he was holding the boat’s tiller, and is being detained pending trial.

Following the decision of the European Court of Human Rights to condemn Greece for the ’systematic practice of refoulement from the Greek islands to Turkey’, the European agency Frontex has announced that it is opening an investigation against the Greek authorities into a dozen allegations of refoulement since 2023. The agency added that if these allegations were proven to be true, Greece could face the suspension of co-funding for joint border surveillance operations. Article 46 of the regulation on the agency’s mandate also allows its executive director to suspend or terminate any operation whose activities give rise to serious violations of fundamental rights that are likely to continue. This decision was taken for the first time in January 2021, when the agency announced the suspension of its operational activities in Hungary, for fear of being held to be complicit in Hungary’s migration policy, following a CJEU ruling in December 2020 condemning Hungary for violating European asylum law.

While the opening of this investigation is a reminder of the impunity with which European states, and Greece in particular, violate international law, the cynicism of such an announcement also illustrates Frontex’s desire to continue to avoid any form of responsibility for violations of international law committed at the EU’s borders. Indeed, for many years, the agency’s complicity in these rights violations has been documented by investigations [35] and accusations brought before the CJEU [36] or the ECHR. The agency is always careful to point out that its sole role is to provide non-decision-making ’support’, and the announcement of the opening of these investigations seems to be nothing more than another subterfuge in an attempt to shirk all responsibility.

 Med5 Summit

The interior ministers of the five countries making up the ’Med5’ group (Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain) met at a summit at the end of which a joint declarationwas published. The declaration highlights the common objectives (virtually unchanged since 2023) of these countries, which recognise themselves as states forming ’the first line of the southern border’. The Med5 advocate for strengthening Frontex (notably by revising its mandate) and border surveillance, increasing migration ’partnerships’ with the ’main countries of origin and transit in Africa, Asia and the Middle East’, developing ’innovative solutions’, overhauling the Return Directive, increasing investment in ’assisted voluntary return’ programmes, combating ’migrant smuggling’, and stepping up communication campaigns aimed at ’discouraging illegal migration’. The ministers also called for ’immediate and unconditional’ European funding, given their ’increased needs’.

There is no mention of respect for human rights in the document, which merely recalls the obligations of States under EU and international law. Although the consequences of the EU’s multiple ’migration partnerships’ with so-called third countries prove that mentioning human rights is never a guarantee of their respect, the silence on this subject is quite eloquent: what the Spanish Interior Minister describes as ’the most important pillar’ seems to be outweighed by the ’prevention of irregular migratory flows’ sought by the five countries. Furthermore, the overall thrust of the positions set out in this press release supports the proposals and measures that are most damaging to human rights: the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, the proposed regulation on returns, pushing for returns falsely described as ’voluntary’, and a revision of Frontex’s mandate aimed at extending the prerogatives of an agency already accused of flouting human rights with impunity and opacity.

 United Kingdom

The French ministry of Interior has announced that it is discussing with the United Kingdom an ’experiment’ involving a system of ’exchanges’ of migrants on a ’one for one’ basis: for each person on the move who arrives in the UK in a so-called irregular manner and is then deported to France, the UK would admit one migrant present in France.

The project, which partly takes up the logic implemented under the 2016 EU-Turkey declaration (whose limitations and infringements of rights have since been widely documented), has been denounced by rights defence associations: by making so-called regular admissions to stay conditional on the deportation of people from the UK, the two countries offer no real alternative to crossing borders outside authorised posts. France is calling for this project to be europeanised, which raises fears that similar arrangements aimed at facilitating the deportation of people on the move to neighbouring countries, regardless of their nationality, could be extended to other EU external borders – in line with the ’innovative solutions’ favoured by many EU Member States, of which the Italy-Albania protocol is a showcase.

 Safe country of origin concept

The European Commission has published a proposal for a regulationto establish a European list of ’safe countries of origin’ under Article 62 of the Procedures Regulationof the European Pact on Migration and Asylum. The list includes Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Kosovo, Morocco and Tunisia. In addition, the candidate countries for accession to the European Union (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, Northern Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine) are designated by default as safe countries of origin, unless special circumstances are demonstrated: if there is armed conflict and indiscriminate violence against civilians in the country in question; if it is subject to sanctions; or if the annual acceptance rate of asylum applications for nationals of this country is higher than 20% in the EU. The Commission is also taking advantage of this text to pursue its desire [37] to speed up the implementation of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum: if the proposal is adopted by the co-legislators, Member States will be authorised to apply the accelerated border procedure to any national of a country for which the acceptance rate of asylum applications in the EU is less than or equal to 20% before the Pact officially comes into force (2026).

This proposal has been strongly criticised for applying the concept of ’safe countries of origin’ to countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, where the persecutions to which people on the move, opposition activists and political figures are exposed [38] seem incompatible with the qualification of ’safe country of origin’. The resulting accelerated processing of asylum applications could be detrimental to applicants from these countries, even though there is no justification for not examining diligently the merits of their application for protection, given the situation in the listed countries. This proposal also backs up the Italian government’s decision to include Egypt and Bangladesh in its list of ’safe countries of origin’ with a view to transferring asylum seekers from these countries to camps in Albania, which the Italian courts considered unfounded [39].

 Criminalisation

In a reportpublished on 29 April 2025, the NGO PICUM highlights the rise in criminalisation of migrants and of activists who help them in Europe, confirming a trend observed over the past four years. The association has recorded nearly a hundred cases of people on the move being accused of ’facilitating irregular migration’ or prosecuted for human trafficking in Italy, Greece and Spain. These charges are often ’founded’ on the simple fact of driving a vehicle carrying a group of migrants. While European states are actively seeking to criminalise the act of migrating, they are also attacking solidarity: more than 140 activists were prosecuted in 2024 for providing food, water or clothing to people on the move, or for rescuing them at sea.

The report comes at a time when the European Parliament and the Council are considering a proposal for a directive from the European Commission, the aim of which is to ’establish minimum rules to prevent and counteract the facilitation of unauthorised entry, transit and residence in the EU’, but which does not expressly exempt solidarity and humanitarian action from the activities to be punished. While the European Parliament’s draft report attempts to incorporate an amendment exempting such actions from prosecution, it still has to make headway in plenary, and then during the negotiations with the Council of the EU. It is to be feared that the process of illegalising migration and solidarity with people on the move will intensify, despite the many cases already brought against migrants and activists, most of which have ended in acquittals. In fact, 95% of the rights defenders whose legal proceedings were concluded during the period studied by the report were acquitted, as were 72% of the People on the move prosecuted for ’migrant smuggling’. This month, for example, the three Afghan asylum seekers accused of setting fire to the Moria camp in 2020 were finally acquitted, after three years of imprisonment, solely on the basis of a statement that had never been the subject of formal testimony before the courts [40].