The EU has long prided itself on setting global standards for human rights. Its new Return Regulation is putting that reputation to the test.
Brussels has long steered clear of the word ‘deportation’—too loaded, too reminiscent of darker chapters in European history. But since the regulation passed, some of its own supporters have started using it openly. Marco Tarquinio (S&D–ITA), a member of the Human Rights Committee, is among those who find that shift alarming. He spoke to EU Perspectives.
Can we now speak of European-style deportation practices?
Even in the European Union, it is becoming possible to talk about deportations, to premeditate them, and to organise them. The EU repatriation regulation is the instrument of choice, heavily promoted and supported by the populist and ethnonationalist right and accepted by the leadership of the EPP—the political group once inspired by Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists but now sliding towards markedly conservative positions.
In our world at war, the deportations of human beings are no longer inconceivable. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, like the US administration of President Donald Trump, makes no secret of its intention to deport a large portion of the Palestinian population from the territories where they have resided for millennia. And Trump himself has made the deportation of ‘illegal immigrants’ the principal instrument of US immigration policy.
Is it dangerous to use the word ‘deportation’ in today’s Europe? What risks might this term pose to society?
It is dangerous to use the term deportations, but even more dangerous to prepare for them. The use of the word aims to instil in public discourse the idea that there are human beings less equal than others, for whom summary and repulsive practices are possible. To get to this point, it is necessary to indicate—and I would say imagine—destinations to which these categories of people should be deported, and to define them as ‘safe’, even if in reality they are not. And here another vocabulary is constructed: safe countries, safe third countries, return hubs…
It is dangerous to use the term deportations, but even more dangerous to prepare for them.
—Marco Tarquinio, MEP
The risks of the theory and practice of deportation are many. The first is the legitimisation of political systems and powers that fail to recognise and guarantee fundamental human rights. The second is a form of legalised violence against certain groups of people. Yet we understood after the era of totalitarianism that when someone’s rights are weakened, the rights of all are actually undermined—and the seeds that give rise to human tragedies, even enormous ones, are sown.
The word was once avoided at the institutional level. Now, many MEPs who voted for the regulation are using it openly. Are there better words to describe what the EU is approving?
The substance counts. There is no point in searching for different words—and it would be dangerous to hunt for euphemisms. The mere fact that MEPs who backed this legislation are openly speaking about deportations should not be what causes outrage. The fact that the EU is authorising and organising them, following the wave from Trump’s USA, must shake things up and mobilise. This has already happened with the years-long closure of regular migration routes from the Global South and the hollowing out of rescue policies on the remaining, dangerous, irregular sea and land routes.
There are solid principles of our European legal system that are not repealed even by the Return Regulation. But they must be safeguarded and applied at a time when appeals to the judiciary are seen as an affront by political power. Let the shameless talk of deportations, then, awaken us.
