The EU’s Informal Readmission Agreements with Third Countries on Migration: Effectiveness over Principles?

Achieving faster and effective returns of irregular migrants is one of the priorities on the Pact on Migration and Asylum proposed by the European Commission. The Commission links the effectiveness of return to the enforcement of return decisions, which, although limited as an analytical benchmark, show that only 30% of return decisions are successful. To improve this ratio, the EU has recently resorted to informal readmission agreements or arrangements with third countries. Through these instruments, the process for binding international agreements established in the Treaties is bypassed. This type of non-binding instrument, generally covered under the ‘soft law’ label, generates major problems for the core principles of the EU legal order of institutional balance, judicial control, and transparency. The aim of this article is to analyse how these acts affect the three main principles of the legal system in the search for a more effective readmission policy using two case studies as the arrangements with Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The article concludes that the avoidance of the three principles does not result in a higher rate of returns.