Migrants’ rights violations: the role of the EU’s policies.

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In its 2025 World Report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) expressed concern about the European Union's new immigration and asylum policies. In May 2024, the EU adopted a new Pact on Migration and Asylum, along with new partnerships with third countries designated as safe. According to HRW, the new legislation is expected to “make it harder to apply for asylum, increasing detention at borders, and allowing EU countries to suspend access to and deny asylum in vaguely defined situations”. 

This raises concerns about the possible violations of the migrants’ rights at the EU’s borders; as a matter of fact, several actors have already reported “serious, recurrent and widespread rights violations against migrants and refugees during border management”, as highlighted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). One of the main issues in this sphere is that violations are often not investigated, and even when investigations do take place, they often do not comply with the EU’s criteria, as they lack transparency and “the requirements of independence, thoroughness, transparency, promptness and victim participation”.  

The above-described situation supports the argument posed by HRW in respect of the European Union and its migration and asylum policies: “there is a gap between the rhetoric of the European Union on human rights and the often inadequate and sometimes abusive laws and practices of member states”. 

Another crucial, related phenomenon is the externalization of borders: such violations are not confined to the EU's direct borders, but occur in third countries as well, partners of the EU on the matter. Indeed, new partnerships or renovated ones with countries like Egypt, Mauritania, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon raise numerous doubts about whether the rights of the migrants are being respected or not. 

Indeed, serious human rights violations have been documented in several of these countries by numerous human rights groups. HRW has previously reported “arbitrary arrests and mistreatment of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees by Egyptian authorities, as well as deportations to Eritrea constituting refoulement” and infringing international laws. In addition, in 2024, “President al-Sisi ratified Egypt’s first asylum law, which failed to prohibit refoulement, lacked due process safeguards, and allowed for the arbitrary detention of refugees and asylum seekers”, according to Amnesty International. 

Systematic abuses against migrants have been reported to be happening in Libya for several years as well. Here, migrants are forced to accept a return to their home countries, often facing a level of vulnerability higher than when they first left. In Libya, migrants face an extremely coercive environment, characterised by “abusive detention conditions, threats of torture, ill-treatment, sexual violence, enforced disappearance, extortion, and other human rights violations and abuses”, by both State and non-State actors, as verified by UN authorities. Despite this, EU States like Italy and Malta continue to support the interceptions of boats in the Mediterranean carried out by Libyan authorities.  

The partnership on the matter of migration and asylum carried out by the European Union with these countries, according to HRW, “exposes the EU to complicity in abuses, contradicts the EU’s founding values, erodes its credibility as a principled global player, and emboldens the far right’s demagogic narrative across Europe”. 

In conclusion, the policies implemented by the European Union on matters of migration and asylum have been largely criticized, as they raise several concerns about further migrants’ rights violations happening at the borders of the EU and in its partner countries’ territories.

written by Alice Scotti