Marc Martorell Junyent is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared in Responsible Statecraft, The New Arab, Mondoweiss and other publications.
The race to the bottom continues unabated in Europe over the treatment of migrants and asylum-seekers trying to reach the continent or already living there. The sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria last month has added more incentive to countries like Italy, Germany and France, which immediately suspended new Syrian asylum requests. Italy, under its far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had already been pushing, along with seven other European Union members including Austria and Greece, to "review" the bloc's strategy toward the Assad regime, with the aim of normalizing diplomatic ties with Assad in order to facilitate deportations of Syrian refugees and migrants. Meloni pitched this all as working "to create the conditions for Syrian refugees to return to their homeland in a voluntary, safe and sustainable way," even though it was clear there was nothing for Syrians to safely return to while Assad was still in power.
Assad's downfall has given more momentum to anti-immigrant policies across Europe to force refugees and migrants out, driven by a resurgent political right. Sweden and the United Kingdom also paused all pending Syrian asylum requests, while Austria, which is home to some 100,000 Syrians, announced plans to deport Syrian refugees.
These moves are just the latest in a backlash against migrants and refugees throughout Europe. The EU has presented agreements in recent years with countries like Tunisia and Egypt to contain migration across the Mediterranean as being in line with European "principles and values," despite extensive evidence of migrant and refugee abuse in those countries. At the same time, the idea of the EU setting up deportation centers for migrants and asylum-seekers outside the bloc's borders, long considered too extreme, is now seen as a matter of fact—the clearest example of an idea to restrict migration that has firmly moved from Europe's political right to the center. It is becoming increasingly difficult to know where the EU's red lines are when it comes to diminishing the rights of migrants and asylum-seekers, or if there are any red lines at all.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to know where the EU's red lines are when it comes to diminishing the rights of migrants and asylum-seekers, or if there are any red lines at all.
- Marc Martorell Junyent
In October, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk asked the EU to temporarily suspend the right to asylum in Poland. He argued it was needed to protect the country's security from the "weaponization" of migration by Belarus and Russia, which the Polish government and the EU accuse of sending waves of migrants to Poland's eastern border. Amnesty International called Tusk's proposal "flagrantly unlawful," and the European Commission initially warned Poland it needed to maintain access to asylum procedures. Two months later, however, the position of the Commission had changed, and it decided to greenlight Poland's plan.
Tusk pushed for the plan at an EU summit in October that was dominated by the issue of migration. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that EU leaders had discussed the creation of so-called "return hubs"—a euphemism for the establishment of mass deportation centers outside the EU for asylum-seekers whose applications are rejected. Although the plan, championed by right-wing parties across Europe, is thin on details and might fail due to a lack of third countries willing to host them, there are some certainties. Rejected applicants for asylum are currently held in an EU member state until they are deported, whereas under the new plan, they could be transferred to these "return hubs" to await final deportation—which could take years. As for the legality of such a plan, the European Commission itself noted in a 2018 document that "it is not possible under EU law on returns to send someone, against their will, to a country they do not originate from or have not transited through."
Along with Syria, Afghanistan ranks high on the list of countries that many European politicians want to artificially designate as "safe" so they can justify deporting Afghan refugees and migrants and rejecting their asylum requests. Austria's now-former chancellor, Karl Nehammer, pushed for those measures before he resigned in early January; he is likely to be replaced as chancellor by the leader of the Austrian far right, Herbert Kickl. Similar language is likely to emerge from Berlin after February's national elections in Germany, where the center-right Christian Democratic Union, which promises border "pushbacks"—forcing migrants or refugees back across the border without considering their asylum claims, in violation of EU and international law—is comfortably leading the polls, trailed by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
The rightward shift in migration and asylum policies is also taking place at the EU level. In April 2024, two months before its elections, the European Parliament was busy approving a package of restrictive laws collectively known as the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Among its most damaging provisions is the possibility for countries to suspend some basic rights at times of "high influx" of migrants. The laws also give EU countries without an external border the right to pay for detention centers at the EU's borders or fund "migration control" outside the EU, instead of accepting refugees themselves.
A group of prominent human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, warned that the pact, billed as so-called asylum reforms, "does not provide any effective solution to the migration management issues raised over the past years, and fails to keep people safe." Still, it is expected to be implemented by mid-2026. Politicians across Europe, ranging from the center-left to the center-right, welcomed the pact, which they justified as a necessary political step to contain the far-right and its anti-immigrant agenda ahead of last year's European Parliament elections.
All over Europe, there is a backlash against our most important values: human rights and the rule of law. In a time of populist and hateful rhetoric, asylum is used as a starting point to dismantle these pillars of our society.
- Wiebke Judith
But that strategy did not work, as the election results showed. Around 25 percent of MPs are now organized into three separate groups to the right of the parliament's largest bloc, the conservative European People's Party (EPP). Before the elections, less than 20 percent of parliamentarians could be classified as right of the EPP. The common narrative after the EU elections was that "the center had held," meaning that the center-left Socialists and Democrats, the liberals of Renew and the EPP all continue to have a majority in parliament. This majority, together with the support of the Greens, made possible the re-election of von der Leyen, a member of the EPP, as president of the European Commission last summer.
Yet this focus on the survival of a centrist majority in Brussels is deceiving. First, it obscures how the so-called "center" has moved to the right on several issues, most notably migration and asylum. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, for example, is among the European leaders advocating for the most restrictive immigration policies despite belonging to the center-left Socialists and Democrats. Second, the EPP's outreach to some far-right parties, such as Meloni's Brothers of Italy, ahead of the EU elections last spring—to prepare the ground in case their votes were needed to re-elect von der Leyen—is having a post-election afterlife. The EPP has been building some parliamentary majorities with the parties to its right, eschewing the centrist majority to its left.
Already, some countries such as Spain and Germany are calling to implement the migration pact sooner than mid-2026. Considering the unilateral moves to restrict asylum by many European countries in recent months, the pact itself might be overtaken by the actions of individual EU member states by then. Poland is not alone in its demand to temporarily suspend asylum rights. The Netherlands and Hungary—which, in any case, has de facto abolished the right to asylum under Prime Minister Viktor Orban—are both demanding an opt-out from EU asylum policy. The Dutch government, in which the far-right Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders has the leading role, is exploring the possibility of deporting asylum-seekers to Uganda—taking cues from the British government's failed proposal to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda, which the U.K.'s Supreme Court ruled was unlawful.
Wiebke Judith of the German NGO Pro Asyl, which advocates for the rights of refugees, calls the migration pact "a huge step backwards when it comes to the human rights of asylum-seekers in the EU." She warns that "it is extremely concerning if member states take the implementation time as a type of 'wild west' situation in which no law really applies." Considering the speed with which asylum policies are now deteriorating from country to country, she says, it is hard to predict what EU asylum politics will look like when the migration pact takes effect next year.
In a political climate rapidly moving against migrants and asylum-seekers, national and European courts have prevented some of the worst excesses by governments. In addition to the Supreme Court decision in Britain against the Rwanda deportations, the European Court of Justice last fall determined that gender and nationality alone are sufficient for a country to grant asylum to Afghan women. In November, an Italian court blocked the Meloni government's plan to deport asylum-seekers to Albania, after Italy had struck a deal in 2023 to send migrants detained while crossing the Mediterranean to camps in the Balkan country.
But governments that are mounting a frontal attack on the right to asylum are unlikely to graciously accept defeat. Meloni's government has been working on new decrees to overcome the court objections. A similar drive motivates Bruno Retailleau, France's conservative interior minister in its new and unstable minority government, who has called immigration "not an opportunity for France" and criticized multiculturalism as incompatible with the country's "Judeo-Christian history." Retailleau has said that French laws and the separation of powers are "not sacrosanct" and should be changed when they fail to keep the public safe in regards to immigration and crime.
"All over Europe, there is a backlash against our most important values: human rights and the rule of law," says Judith. "We see that in a time of populist and hateful rhetoric, it is often the topic of asylum that is used as a starting point to dismantle these pillars of our society."
"Defending the rights of refugees also means defending our own rights," she adds. "Right-wing populists will never stop at the topic of asylum, as they use migration and asylum strategically to weaken human rights and the rule of law as a whole."