Webinar on EU Return Regulation, Return Hubs and the Balkans: Detention and Deportation in Practice

Over the past year, our teams have been looking closely at what would the EU “return policies” mean in practice for people on the move in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. The position paper at the centre of our recent webinar shows that many people are being locked up for migration-related reasons, often for long periods, in difficult conditions and with very little access to lawyers, medical care, or fair procedures. This includes children and other people in vulnerable situations, whose detention clearly contradicts basic human rights standards.​

The paper also raises the alarm about plans to create EU “return hubs” in countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, which would expand these harmful practices and push responsibility for returns further outside the EU’s borders. Instead of building new detention-based return infrastructure, the we argue that the EU and its partners should stop the rollout of return hubs, end detention as a default response to migration, guarantee the right to seek asylum and protection from being sent back to danger, and invest in safe routes and fair, dignified procedures.​

We have now uploaded the full recording of the webinar on our website, so you can watch the discussion, hear from speakers on the ground, and learn more about the paper’s key findings and recommendations/

Link to webinar recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T8J2uMFKjO8wGVcucipmu5hcLVVpQEaM/view?usp=sharing
Link to position paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ygUEB_EYG5QX-A8WpSURDDzfcXuCR-Mg/view