Five EU states agree a model for migrant return hubs outside the bloc by 2027

Interior ministers from Denmark, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece agreed in Copenhagen on Friday on a common model for return hubs outside the European Union. They want a deal with at least one partner country by the end of 2026 and the first transfers of rejected asylum seekers in 2027.

Danish immigration minister Morten Bodskov said the group expected a common understanding with a partner country around the New Year. He set the end of 2027 as Denmark's target for moving people. German interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said the five governments wanted agreements this year that would let them build the hubs. They will meet again in Munich at the end of September.

The ministers did not name a host. Press reports have pointed to Rwanda and Uganda. Uzbekistan has also been discussed in earlier briefings. The Netherlands signed a letter of intent with Uganda on returns in September 2025, then stepped back after a change of government, while remaining interested in hubs. Austria signed an economic and migration deal with Uzbekistan in May 2026. Denmark's earlier Rwanda talks drew a warning from the UN Committee against Torture in 2023 about the risk of ill-treatment and chain refoulement.

The legal door opened in June, when the European Parliament approved a law that lets member states set up return hubs in non-EU countries, provided those countries meet human rights and international law tests. The five states now say they have a shared operating model: who pays, whose law applies inside the fence, how long a person can be held, and what happens if the host refuses a later transfer onward.

The people in scope are not new arrivals awaiting a first asylum decision. They are people who have already been refused the right to stay and who cannot, in practice, be sent to their countries of origin. Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia are the nationalities European ministers keep naming when they describe that gap. Sweden's migration minister has said Nordic states may pilot hubs for one nationality at a time.

The five will finance the sites themselves and may add other incentives for the host. Civil society groups in Europe have already called the plan a way to move people beyond the reach of European courts. The ministers' answer is that the June law exists, that returns inside Europe have stalled, and that a hub in a third country is now a legal tool rather than a slogan.

Dover's blocked port roads on Saturday, and the stop-the-boats chants that closed the A20 for hours, sit in the same week. They are not the same policy. The Copenhagen text is about people already on EU territory who have lost their cases. The Dover protest is about arrivals across the Channel. Both arguments feed the same ministerial calendar.

Uganda's anti-LGBT laws would collide with any transfer of queer applicants. Rwanda's record on political opponents is the reason UN bodies flagged Denmark's earlier plan. Those objections have not disappeared. They are now items for the Munich meeting and for whatever memorandum the five put in front of a host around the New Year.

Bodskov's sentence is the one to keep. The group wants to be ready to transfer the first irregular migrants to a partner country outside of the EU in 2027. That is a date, a direction of travel and an unfinished contract. The missing name on the contract is the country that will take the people. Until that name is public, the hubs are a model on paper and a fight already under way in European courts that have not yet seen the first flight.