Brussels, Belgium | 29 November 2025 (IDN) — On 11 November, the European Commission unveiled the long-awaited details of the much discussed allocation key of the EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact, marking a major reform of Europe’s migration system that will come into force on 12 June, 2026.
The pact aims to create faster and more uniform procedures, strengthen solidarity among member states, relieve pressure on hosting facilities, increase visibility on migration, and combat human trafficking. Under the new system, migrants arriving at the EU’s borders will face a faster screening procedure, with those from countries with asylum recognition rates of 20% or less taking place in just 12 weeks at the EU’s external borders. During this procedure, fingerprints and personal data will be collected and stored in a new central EU database.
Furthermore, a crisis clause is adopted for flexibility in crisis situations, and a solidarity mechanism will require each member state to contribute either by taking in asylum seekers or by providing financial support. Lastly, new investments will be made in capacity building for border control and anti-smuggling operations with third countries.
With these measures, the pact’s implementation continues to rely on cooperation with countries outside the EU, building upon the EU’s long-standing practice of externalizing migration control through partnerships with countries such as Tunisia, Libya, Turkey, Niger, and Mauritania.
Externalisation to Libya
In this external strategy, Libya is expected to remain a central player as the country holding the largest share of departures along the Mediterranean route and carrying a long-standing history with European migration politics.
In 2008, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi signed the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation. Italy promised to invest $5 billion in Libyan infrastructure, with one of the main conditions to jointly intercept and return migrant boats. This marked the first major deal between countries of the African and European continents with large-scale efforts to reduce migrant flows.
When Libya’s civil war erupted just three years later and Gaddafi was killed, the treaty effectively collapsed. One year later, in 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy’s so-called “pushbacks” returning refugees to Libya were illegal and ordered the country to halt the practice. Following the European migrant crisis in 2015, Italy signed a new EU-supported Memorandum of Understanding with Libya’s UN-backed government in 2017. This agreement followed similar principles, with the main difference being that Italy and the EU invested heavily in Libya’s coast guard and detention centers, effectively shifting the responsibility for intercepting and returning migrants to Libyan authorities.
The reasoning behind this political strategy was that tightly sealing Europe’s external borders would account for fewer migrants reaching the continent, while simultaniously discouraging others from attempting the journey. Combining this effect with the provisions to track down smuggling networks, and according to the EU’s substantiation, the results will yield fewer people falling victim to merciless human traffickers, or passing away on makeshift boats on the mediterranean sea.
Counterproductive results
However, research from among others Tilburg University, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and Cairn Info has found that, paradoxically, a counterproductive effect can be observed. While on the short term, fewer migrants had attempted the journey to Italy, on the long term this deal has actually resulted in more human trafficking, and a larger push factor to cross the mediterranean for certain groups.
The latter effect can be explained through the historically large groups of migrants residing in Libya, currently counting at least 895,000. A part of this group consists of refugees of war and oppression who usually do not have other alternatives but to attempt the crossing, with the deterrence having little effect on their decisions, as they have nowhere to go.
The majority of this group however, are labor migrants with no initial intention to travel to Europe, drawn instead by the country’s still growing economy. Yet, under the 2017 treaty, Libya introduced new laws that criminalized migrants, leaving many at risk of arrest, fines, detention, and extortion whilst the country’s political situation continued to deteriorate. Over time, the risk of violence or imprisonment in Libya has become a stronger concern for some individuals than the dangers of crossing the Mediterranean, argues the Cairn Info report.
Human trafficking business
Due to this policy of detection and criminalization, smugglers and traffickers had to come up with new routes to avoid authorities, leaving migrants more dependent on human traffickers and militia groups. While the closed borders made it harder for groups to earn money by linearly smuggling people towards Europe, a new system of kidnapping and extortion started expanding. It became increasingly commonplace to seize groups of vulnerable refugees and migrants into warehouses deep in the Sahara desert, where they were tortured while forced to call family members until they had paid ransoms up to ten thousands of euros.
Libyan actors quickly discovered that under this new system they could suddenly make double the money: first by capturing migrants through EU funds, and then by selling them to extortion houses, claiming an estimated 40% of this industry valued at over 1 billion USD between 2016 – 2021 from Eritrean refugees alone. As a result, Libyan actors have increasingly collaborated with and facilitated human smugglers and traffickers on their territory.
Thus, the externalisation of Europe’s migration management appears to also enrich smugglers, traffickers, and other actors in Libya, taking advantage of the increased insecurity of refugees and migrants. The emerged organised extortion network has left no regular pathways for migration, trapping these people in a cycle of violence involving trafficking for ransom, forced labour and other forms of extortion.
EU risks
Therefore, the externalisation policies proposed in the migration pact do not come without risk, both in terms of human rights violations as well as legal consequences for the EU. Last month, a group of human rights lawyers led by Omer Shatz and Juan Branco filed a 700-page legal brief at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against 122 European officials including French President Emmanuel Macron, and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This case follows a six-year investigation, with the lawyers accusing the EU of knowingly implementing migration policies that led to thousands of deaths at sea, the forced return of migrants to Libya, and complicity in crimes against humanity committed in Libyan detention camps
This lawsuit does not stand alone, but follows a long series of reports by human rights organisations and a 2023 UN fact-finding report with similar conclusions, in which the EU was accused of complicity to human rights impacts of its migration policies. If such concerns are not explicitly addressed in the migration pact, research shows that the increased externalisation risks further implicating the EU in human rights abuses in Libya, while the boat crossings continue.