EU could open deportation centres outside bloc by next year, says Denmark PM

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European countries could set up EU-funded deportation centres outside the bloc by next year, Denmark’s prime minister has said, amid a broader hardening of immigration policy driven by the rise of far-right parties.

Mette Frederiksen, who has long championed the idea of “return hubs”, told the FT that work was under way to get funding from the European Commission for such facilities based in non-EU countries.

“You will see a group of countries like a coalition of the willing . . . supported by the Commission,” she said. “In 2026-27, we will see the first return hub outside [Europe] . . . I think we will be able to do it within the next year.”

Outsourcing migration management to non-EU countries has long been taboo, but in recent years more governments have swung behind the idea. The Danish government has been an early promoter of this concept, and in 2021 started talks with Rwanda about setting up a centre for asylum seekers there. The plans were later suspended amid political uproar and legal and human rights concerns, with Copenhagen pushing for EU-funded hubs instead.

Frederiksen’s comments came just a few days after 19 EU countries spoke in favour of offshore migration policies modelled on an Italian hub set up in Albania in 2024, and said they should be funded by the EU budget. Earlier this month, a top adviser to the European Court of Justice said the Albanian scheme could be compatible with EU law if it applied EU human rights regulations to people held there; a final ruling by the court is still pending.

A Commission spokesperson on Monday said that legislation was now in place to set up the hubs and that “the next steps are in the hands of the member states”, with Brussels ready to “assess any mature proposal”.

But some countries, notably France, still oppose the idea. President Emmanuel Macron said last week he had not seen a return hub “that works” and that he would be against using the EU budget for such schemes. “I’m not sure that these are the fundamental principles on which our Europe was built,” Macron added.

Frederiksen has faced criticism from other fellow social democrats for her hardline stance, and many critics believe it will be impossible to guarantee EU standards and human rights in the centres outside the bloc.

She insisted that human rights would be protected, without providing details as to how that would be enforced. She also said she was comfortable with far-right parties supporting her plans, given that she did not agree with them on other issues.

“As a social democrat, it’s quite clear that the price you are paying when migration turns into problems is paid by the lower classes in your society,” she said. “Being a social democrat nowadays means tackling, handling mass migration in Europe . . . nobody has been able to convince me that it’s not a social democratic idea to have return hubs outside Europe.”

“[The hubs] have to be according to international law. I think everybody agrees on that. So it will be a hub outside Europe, but on European conditions,” she added. “None of us wants to do something that is not sustainable. We would like to do this in a correct way and to treat people like we do in Europe.”

A regulation in support of so-called return hubs, which would host rejected asylum seekers who cannot be deported to their homes, passed through the European parliament last week with the support of far-right parties, with MEPs chanting “Send them back”.

Frederiksen declined to name the countries her government was in talks with to host the proposed centres.

She said that she wanted the hubs to handle both people ordered to leave the bloc as well as incoming asylum seekers, but acknowledged that the scope was not yet settled.

“Where are we solving the problems with mass migration? Inside Europe or outside Europe?” asked Frederiksen. “Now, for the first time, our point of view is that it has to be outside Europe. And that is the biggest movement, the biggest change in all of this.”

“We have moved from talking about the need to be in control of our borders . . . to how are we going to, on a very concrete level, make these hubs.”

Additional reporting by Paola Tamma in Brussels