Deliverable D3.2
Authors: Carmine Conte, Migration Policy Group, Başak Yavçan, Migration Policy Group, Marianna Gorgerino, Migration Policy Group., Shabnamsadat Khezri, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Return policies are at the top of the EU and national agenda. On 14 October 2024, the European Commission President von der Leyen sent a letter to EU leaders ahead of a two-day summit in Brussels highlighting key objectives and actions of the next EU migration and asylum political programme. The President called for establishing a common approach to return policies across Member States and a better harmonisation of these policies across Europe. To this end, a crucial goal of the EU is to improve cooperation on readmission with partner countries and continue to build comprehensive partnerships with key third countries on migration.
This working paper provides an analysis of migration cooperation agreements, specifically readmission agreements, signed by EU/EFTA countries and the European Union with third countries from 2008 to 2023. The analysis focuses on the number of agreements signed, their enforceability and legal bindingness, geographical distribution, issue linkages with other policy areas, implementation and monitoring. The data is sourced from a detailed inventory of Intergovernmental Return Frameworks (IRFs) including various EU/EFTA countries and the European Union, which has been gathered by the country experts of the Finding Agreements in Return (FAIR) consortium under the coordination of the Migration Policy Group (MPG). This paper looks only at the agreements formally signed after 2008 and does not include the IRFs that have been signed before this year and entered into force later on.
One of the main objectives and ambitions of this inventory is to contribute improving the quality and clarity of existing data on return and readmission. The current main sources of information on bi- and multilateral cooperation regarding return and readmission are the inventory compiled by Cassarino (2022) and the data collection by the European Migration Network (2022). These resources provide essential insights into the agreements shaping return policies and cooperation between European states, but they are mostly limited to taking quantitative stock of IRFs.
This FAIR inventory on IRFs goes beyond these current data collections and will provide more detailed information on the content of IRFs to date. It will do so by providing systematic and comparative information on the scope of IRFs, their implementation mechanisms, or issue-linkages. To build this dataset, FAIR national experts conducted a detailed analysis of the agreements themselves. Unlike other inventories, which primarily catalogued return frameworks, our approach required country experts to systematically read, identify, and code specific elements within the agreements. The dataset includes intergovernmental return frameworks (IRFs) from 11 countries and European Union’s return agreements with third countries. While we used Cassarino’s and EMN’s inventories as a starting point, national experts expanded the research by looking at additional agreements through national repositories.