The European Commission’s current public position on the U.K. policy is, in the words of one EU official asked by POLITICO to interpret it, “cryptic”. When Sunak’s latest legal fix passed last month, a spokesperson simply said: “We take note of the adoption of the Safety of Rwanda Bill. We call on the U.K. to respect its international commitments and ensure effective access to asylum procedures.”
Yet while leaders like Nehammer and Meloni are happy to talk up Sunak’s Rwanda plan, they aren’t necessarily pursuing exact carbon copies. There remains a distinction between the U.K’s approach of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda permanently without recourse, and what even the most interested EU leaders say they are considering.
A different approach
Meloni’s recent returns agreement with Albania, for example, would see asylum seekers have their cases processed in the Balkan country, but with successful applicants ultimately able to go and live in Italy. Nehammer, while full of praise for Sunak’s approach, is eyeing a scheme based on a similar model to that of Italy. This was also the approach being looked at in Denmark —although there it is currently on ice following a change in government.
“The options that are under consideration in Europe, and I think the discussions around what this could look like if it were to be done in Europe, look different than the U.K. Rwanda model,” Fratzke said, noting there was more willingness on the continent to work “within the parameters of both EU law and international law.” Unlike most EU proposals, the U.K. policy does not offshore the processing of asylum applications, but instead relocates arrivals to another country without considering their cases.
The idea of processing asylum applications outside the EU isn’t a particularly novel one: in 2018 the Juncker commission proposed a network of euphemistically-named “regional disembarkation platforms” where asylum seekers could have their claims processed rather than making the dangerous crossing over the Mediterranean.
Even if they don’t end up following quite the same model as the U.K., talking up Sunak’s Rwanda policy seems to give EU leaders wanting to move in this direction the political space to put offshore processing on the agenda again in Brussels.
Yet the challenges remain: “disembarkation platforms” did not happen last time in part because of practical issues. As well as legal complexities in international and EU asylum law, few third party countries want to host migrants, and even fewer of those that do are considered safe.
Britain has attempted to square that circle in two ways: the first is the legislation defining Rwanda as safe regardless of the evidence. The second is a huge amount of money: the U.K. government’s own costings estimate the would policy to cost £1.8 million per asylum seeker for the first 300 people deported. Whether EU governments are prepared to embrace either of these workarounds remains to be seen.