Europe’s Dirty Little Secret: How the EU’s Offshore Migration Deals Erode International Law and Expose Hypocrisy

Lachie Macfarlan | Europe and Eurasia Fellow

Image sourced from Ggia via Wikimedia Commons.

Twelve years ago, Tony Abbott popularised the ‘Stop the Boats’ slogan in Australia. Offshore detention had existed before, but Abbott turned cruelty into spectacle. Today, Nauru remains open, a monument to that policy. Since then, Abbott’s vision of border externalisation has become increasingly popular, not only referring to asylum seekers coming by boat to Australia, but also those trying to enter the European Union (EU).

Like Australia, the EU has a history of exporting its borders through deals with third countries, such as Libya, Morocco and Turkey. These policies undermine the 1951 Refugee Convention (ratified or acceded to by each EU Member State), which guarantees the right to seek asylum, and expose the hollowness of Europe’s claim to defend international law and the ‘rules-based order’. Ending these practices is essential if Europe seeks any meaningful moral credibility on an international stage.

The “Fortress Europe” mentality hardened after 2015, when over one million people sought asylum amid Syria’s civil war. The influx coincided with austerity measures and terror attacks in Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016, fuelling public anxiety and saw populist parties turn migration into a key wedge issue. In that political climate, exporting asylum processing to non-EU countries became the path of least resistance, yet a dangerous one that is politically expedient, legally dubious, and morally corrosive.

Externalisation in Practice

The EU-Turkey deal of March 2016 has become Europe’s blueprint for deterrence. Under its 1:1 “return and resettlement” scheme, irregular arrivals from Turkey to Greece were sent back in exchange for Syrian refugees admitted directly from Turkey. Within months, arrivals fell by 94 per cent and Aegean deaths halved over a two-year period. Yet critics warn that these numbers cannot be taken at face value: the deal also trapped tens of thousands in Greek camps and diverted others onto longer, deadlier routes through the Balkans.

Italy’s 2023-24 agreement with Albania perpetuated Europe’s preference for externalisation. It envisioned “fast-track” processing of up to 36,000 asylum seekers annually to Albanian centres under Italian control, aiming to capitalise on a potential loophole in EU asylum law. In August 2025, the European Court of Justice struck down key provisions, ruling that “safe country” designations require judicial review. Even beyond the EU, the United Kingdom’s failed Rwanda plan shows how offshoring has become politically contagious.

The Human Cost and Europe’s Hypocrisy

Human Rights Watch and Médecins Sans Frontières have documented indefinite detention, overcrowding and limited legal access in externalised facilities. Between 2017 and 2020, NGOs recorded 89 pushback incidents on the Greek-Turkish border affecting more than 4,500 people, half of them minors. Survivors described beatings and forced immersion in water. These abuses stand in direct violation of the Refugee Convention’s cornerstone principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits a state from returning refugees to a country where they may face persecution or other serious harm.

More recent pacts with Tunisia and Libya show the extent of Europe’s externalisation: horse-trading human rights violations for trade and political influence in North Africa. By outsourcing migration control to fragile states, Europe exports instability, while promising financial, trade-related, and political benefits. Refugees caught in these transition zones often slip into trafficking networks, fuelling the very cycles of conflict and displacement that Europe claims to aim to contain.

The hypocrisy is glaring. Since 2022, the EU has championed accountability under international law for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet it undermines those same legal norms by outsourcing asylum to regimes with poor rights records. Europe cannot defend the rule of law abroad while hollowing it out at home.

What Europe Must Do

Australia remains an ongoing warning: more than a decade after “Stop the Boats,” Nauru still detains asylum seekers indefinitely, despite UN findings that the offshore detention regime is in violation of international law. Yet Europe’s border externalisation has drastically expanded the scale and equally entrenched the model. While Australia has processed only a few thousand people offshore since 2013, the EU’s border externalisation shapes the movement of hundreds of thousands each year. The risk is not merely that Europe will become the new Australia by placing lives in limbo, but that it has already normalised a legally and morally unjustified model of asylum seeker offshoring on a continental scale.

To reverse this trajectory, Europe must treat migration governance as a collective legal and humanitarian responsibility rather than a race to the bottom. First, the Dublin system must be reformed to distribute responsibility according to capacity, population and GDP, rather than geography. This reform is central to restoring internal solidarity and reducing the political incentive for externalisation. The European Commission must lead on binding quotas rather than voluntary schemes. Second, safe and legal routes must be expanded (such as humanitarian visas, resettlement programs and family reunification) to reduce dependence on smugglers and perilous crossings. Third, the false solution of third-country partnerships should be rejected altogether. Offshoring asylum is not reform but abdication, and no amount of oversight can sanitise it. Processing must occur on European soil if the EU is to meet its obligations and preserve credibility in defending human rights.

These reforms will meet resistance from populist governments and risk political backlash within the Council, but the alternative is worse: a Europe that preaches law abroad while breaking it at home. If Europe continues to trade away asylum, the ‘rules-based order’ it preaches abroad will collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

Lachie Macfarlan is a final-year student at the Australian National University, where he studies a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) specialising in International & Comparative Law, and a Bachelor of International Security Studies. He recently returned from a year in Vienna – spending six months on academic exchange studying international law at University of Vienna, and six months working on multilateral policy full-time at Australia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations (Vienna).

Through this fellowship, Lachie hopes to provide accessible commentary on intra-European dynamics and Europe’s evolving role in the international system, aiming to connect European developments and experiences with Australian foreign policy debates.

Our 2025 Europe and Eurasia Fellow is sponsored by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy (CDD) at the University of Canberra. For more information, visit their website here.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Young Australians in International Affairs. All content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.