The article discusses the recast of the EU Return Directive (2008/115/EC) from the perspective of effectiveness and fundamental rights protection, as two underlying objectives of the Directive. Relying on the implementation assessment of the Directive carried out by the European Parliamentary Research Service, the article analyses the way in which Member States have implemented the Directive and how this has impacted the effectiveness of the Directive. If adopted as proposed, will the recast strengthen or further undermine the effectiveness? The assessment focuses on return decision, voluntary departure, entry ban, and detention. It also looks at omissions in the recast proposal, namely a missed opportunity to remedy the current shortcomings as regards non-returnable people. As the article concludes, the recast proposal will hardly improve the effectiveness of return and may lead to violations of fundamental rights of people in an irregular situation.

The article addresses the Schengen-wide entry ban, which is one of the key measures laid down in the EU Returns Directive (2008/115/EC). The entry ban entails that a non-citizen expelled from one member state is barred from returning to the whole Schengen area for up to five years, or longer in case of a threat to public policy or national security. The pan-European validity of the entry ban is ensured by an alert entered in the Schengen Information System (SIS). The alert is a set of personal data registered in the SIS which states may process to identify the person with a view of the refusal of entry. Processing personal data of non-citizens may pose a challenge to the protection of their data. The article assesses data protection rules laid down in the SIS Regulation (Regulation 1987/2006) and the Regulation which will replace it (Regulation 2018/1861). As it argues, SIS-specific data protection safeguards are frequently narrower than rules under data protection law, including the General Data Protection Regulation and Council of Europe Convention 108, and fall short of requirements flowing from the right to privacy under the European Convention of Human Rights and EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This article analyses freedom-restricting measures set forth in the Reception Conditions Directive and its proposed recast; it does so through the lens of the concept of crimmigration, understood as convergence between criminal and (administrative) immigration and asylum law. To tackle “secondary movements” within the European Union (EU), the proposed amendment of the Directive establishes a broad understanding of the risk of absconding, which can justify detention, and expands the restrictions on asylum-seekers’ freedom of movement. The article argues that asylum detention under EU law pursues penal law objectives, such as deterrence and retribution. Restriction on freedom of movement, on its part, may amount to systematic surveillance. This observed crimmigration phenomenon is detrimental to migrants and refugees because the incorporation of criminal law objectives into asylum law has an asymmetric form. Although states subject non-citizens to increasingly punitive measures, the administrative label of immigration detention and restrictions on movement allows them to evade due process guarantees, which typically accompany criminal law proceedings. As the article proposes, appropriate interpretation and application of the principles of lawfulness and proportionality with respect to detention and restrictions on freedom of movement will help circumscribe the scope of the phenomenon of crimmigration under the EU asylum legislation.

Reflecting the focus of this Special Issue on “Rule of Law and Human Mobility in the Age of the Global Compacts,” this article contributes to the discussion on the threats to the rule of law posed by immigration detention through the lens of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). In GCM’s Objective 13, states committed to use immigration detention only as a measure of last resort, work towards alternatives and draw from eight sets of actions to realise this commitment. Given the attention the GCM attracts, its nonbinding character and the voluntary nature of its review can be used by states as justification for their inadequate implementation of binding human rights obligations and insufficient reporting on implementation to the supervising bodies. While acknowledging these challenges to the rule of law, this article explores the ways the GCM can actually foster the rule of law in the area of immigration detention. To strengthen the rule of law principles of legality, legal certainty, prohibition of arbitrariness, access to justice and the right to an effective remedy, Objective 13 needs to support a binding human rights regime by preventing arbitrary detention and its implementation at the domestic level. The article discusses the interplay between Objective 13 on the one hand, and, on the other, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families and Convention on the Rights of the Child at three levels—the detention provisions, the support provided to states for the implementation of these provisions and the monitoring of states’ implementation—and it proposes means to strengthen the synergies between the two frameworks.