Five EU States Plan African 'Return Hubs' for Rejected Asylum Seekers by 2027

Five European nations have committed to building what they call "return hubs" in Africa, facilities designed to process asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected before they are sent back to their home countries. Greece, Germany, Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands announced the plan in late September 2026, with Greece's Migration Minister Thanos Plevris telling the Greek broadcaster ANT1 that the first hub could open in the second half of 2027, conveniently timed for Greece's presidency of the EU Council. An African partner country has already been selected, though Plevris declined to name it publicly. Diplomatic sources and media outlets close to Brussels have suggested Rwanda or Uganda as likely candidates, but neither nation has confirmed its involvement.

This initiative represents the latest attempt by EU member states to solve a problem that has vexed European policymakers for years: what to do with people whose asylum claims fail. The idea of processing deportations outside EU borders is not new. The United Kingdom tried it under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, spending £715 million to establish a partnership with Rwanda. The scheme collapsed when Britain's Supreme Court ruled it illegal, finding that asylum seekers faced a real risk of being returned to countries where they could face persecution. In the end, only four people voluntarily went to Rwanda. Italy launched its own version in 2024, transporting migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean to camps in Albania. Italian courts quickly halted the transfers, ruling that countries like Bangladesh and Egypt could not be blanket-classified as safe when certain groups face persecution there. Italy has since converted one facility into a deportation center for men whose asylum claims have been definitively rejected in Italy itself—a much narrower operation that has sent roughly 500 people since March 2025, at an estimated cost exceeding €670 million by 2028.

The new European plan differs from these predecessors in important ways. Plevris emphasized that the hubs will not be sealed detention centers where rejected asylum seekers languish indefinitely. Instead, they will function as open facilities where individuals wait while their deportations to their countries of origin are arranged. The five participating nations will retain legal responsibility for the people transferred there, preventing the African host country from facing human rights lawsuits. The EU states will also finance the entire operation themselves. International organizations including the UN Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration are expected to monitor the hubs to ensure compliance with human rights standards and international law.

What has changed to make this attempt potentially viable where others failed is the legal framework. The EU's revised asylum law now permits member states to transfer individuals to safe third countries without requiring a personal connection—no need to prove the person speaks the language, has relatives there, or has lived there before. More significantly, the EU Return Regulation, agreed to politically in June 2026 by the Council and European Parliament, provides a common legal foundation for such centers. Once formally adopted, this regulation will apply directly across participating member states, creating a unified approach rather than individual national experiments. Critically, the new model does not outsource the entire asylum procedure to third countries, as the UK and Italy attempted. Instead, the hubs serve purely as transit stations for people whose asylum claims have already been legally rejected in Europe.

Yet the track record offers little reason for confidence. Human rights organizations including Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International have raised alarm about the plan. They question whether independent oversight, effective legal representation, and adequate medical care can truly be guaranteed in facilities located thousands of miles from EU courts and institutions. They worry that African governments, despite agreements with Brussels, could still deport people to their home countries without proper individual assessment of whether those individuals face persecution or torture. The financial picture is equally troubling. Past attempts at outsourced asylum processing have consumed hundreds of millions of euros while returning remarkably few people. The British Rwanda scheme spent nearly a billion euros and returned four people. Italy's Albanian model has cost more than €670 million to return roughly 500 people. The question haunting this new initiative is whether the legal innovations and international monitoring provisions will prove sufficient to overcome the fundamental obstacles that have derailed every similar effort: the difficulty of guaranteeing human rights protections across borders, the astronomical costs, and the stubborn reality that very few people actually get deported once their claims are rejected.