The United Nations refugee agency has endorsed “return hubs” in a boost to potential Government plans to send failed asylum seekers to third countries.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Government has been seeking to crack down on people-smuggling across the Channel and there have been reports that they could seek to send failed asylum seekers to overseas hubs in the Balkans.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper met the UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, last month.
During the meeting she discussed the prospect of paying countries in the Balkans to take Britain’s failed asylum seekers, The Times reported.
The UNHCR has set out how return hubs could work while meeting its legal standards in a document published this week.
A Government source said it was a helpful intervention that could make the legal pathway to some form of return hub model potentially smoother.
The UNHCR said return hubs could “appropriately be explored” and that it could play a role in supporting countries to use them as long as it does not conflict with its mandate to protect refugees.
The agency recommended monitoring to make sure human rights standards are “reliably met” at any hubs.
The country hosting the return hub would need to grant temporary legal status for migrants and the sending country would need to support it to make sure there are “adequate accommodation and reception arrangements”, the refugee agency said.
It said there has been “increasing attention” on the concept of return hubs and the role they may play in supporting returns.
The EU Commission recently proposed allowing EU members to set up so-called “return hubs” abroad.
Italy has already started sending migrants with no permission to remain in the country to Italian-run migration detention centres in Albania.
At a summit last month, Sir Keir said the UK was working “very closely” with Italian ministers to consider ways to process migrants with asylum claims in a third country.
He told reporters anything that will be looked at has got to be “consistent with international law” and “cost effective”.
The Prime Minister has pledged to “smash the gangs” smuggling people across borders to travel to the UK.
A total of 9,099 migrants have crossed the English Channel so far this year.
A migrant died while trying to make the crossing on Friday, the RNLI confirmed.
More than 700 migrants crossed on Tuesday, in the highest number of arrivals on a single day this year.
More arrivals have been recorded in January to April 2025 than in the equivalent four-month period in any year since data on Channel crossings began in 2018.
