By Manuel Alejandro Núñez Ochoa
In February 2026, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union (EU) adopted new rules on safe third countries (STC) and the EU list of safe countries of origin (SCO). The decisions aim to amend EU asylum procedure regulations to enable faster processing of asylum requests and consider unfounded refugee claims from SCOs. The decision promotes the externalisation of the asylum system and poses risks of protection and human rights violations to asylum seekers, mainly by undermining the principle of non-refoulement and weakening procedural safeguards.
Approved legal text
The latest changes on the SCO concept are part of the broader EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, which was adopted in 2024 and took effect on 12 June 2026. The approved text defines an SCO as a country that is presumed safe for its own citizens by the EU because there is no risk of persecution or torture there, and no threat of human rights violations.
Under the new legislation, an SCO is considered to be a country from which 20% or fewer applicants are granted international protection. Therefore, when a national from an SCO applies for asylum, an accelerated procedure will be applied, as the country is considered safe and the application unfounded. If the applicant has not entered the territory of an EU member state, their application will be examined on its merits through a border procedure. To avoid their application from being inadmissible, the applicant must rebut the presumption of safety by proving that they face an additional and particular risk of persecution or torture.
The new legislation also allows an SCO to be labelled as partially safe, while other regions might not be considered safe at all for the return of asylum seekers. Some ethnic groups or populations may also be considered to be at risk in an SCO. The new legislative instrument introduces the mandatory use of the SCO concept and establishes common criteria for its designation in the EU.
Violations of the Refugee Convention and Protocol
The blanket designation of countries as ‘safe’ violates the principle of non-refoulement, as asylum seekers from those countries will face an accelerated procedure that will deem their refugee claims unfounded and facilitate their removal to their country of origin, where they may face serious risks to their life, ill-treatment, discrimination, persecution or torture. Many country of origin information (COI) reports document the risks asylum seekers face in their home countries. For instance, COI reports identify high levels of internal displacement and violence by several armed groups in countries designated as SCOs, such as Colombia. Furthermore, Colombia represents the third largest population of asylum seekers in the world.
Moreover, despite the safeguard that allows EU countries to designate certain geographical areas and communities as being at risk of persecution, the rest of the country may still be considered safe. As a result, refugee claims could be dismissed on the basis that asylum seekers are likely able to relocate internally to escape the risk, where protection from local officials or even rogue state actors is seen as available in designated safe areas of the country.
Additionally, the SCO framework poses a risk to minority groups and populations that have been systematically and historically subjected to discrimination and human rights abuses. For example, people with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) face prosecution under morality laws in Egypt and criminal convictions in Morocco, Tunisia and Bangladesh, with sanctions of up to three years’ imprisonment for same-sex relations in Tunisia.
Finally, the SCO legislation disregards the risks faced by survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) and human trafficking in their countries of origin. In many cases, weak criminal prosecution and investigation of cases reduce the chances of obtaining evidence to support survivors’ refugee claims and demonstrate an individual risk of persecution. Moreover, survivors often face severe trauma and social stigma in their origin countries that prevent them from being identified. For example, women face serious social and familial sanctions if they are perceived as bringing shame upon the honour of the community. In the case of the SOGIESC population, survivors face harassment, social exclusion, discrimination and criminalisation.
The externalisation of the asylum system
As most SCOs are also transit hubs for asylum seekers trying to reach the EU, the design of the SCO framework is related to STC legislation, making it possible to consider a country as both an SCO and STC. However, SCOs are not necessarily safe countries of asylum. Through the SCOs practice, the EU promotes externalisation by facilitating the return of asylum seekers to either their country of origin or to another country where they are at risk. Colombia, for example, hosts Venezuelans political opposition leaders who have suffered armed attacks in its territory, while Ecuadorian asylum seekers face risks from former FARC dissident groups that have military influence in certain areas of the country. The EU will likely use the new legislation to deter asylum seekers en route to the bloc’s territory and control migration through transit hubs such as Colombia, Egypt and Bangladesh, which host large refugee populations that face protection risks.
The EU is seeking to outsource the processing of refugee applications and exert pressure on third countries’ refugee systems that are already under-resourced, overwhelmed and have weak administrative capacity to respond. Moreover, some SCOs have already established agreements with the EU to contain refugees in their home countries. This has resulted in practices such as pushbacks, deportations, arbitrary detentions and human rights violations that have been systematically ignored by the EU.
In addition, a significant number of SCOs registered cases involving human rights violations, ill-treatment and torture that contravene the minimum protection safeguards and standards required under the European Convention on Human Rights. In Tunisia, for example, the current government has been involved in repressing political opponents, journalists and human rights defenders, as well as restricting freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. Furthermore, access to asylum has been suspended in previous years, despite the European Union Agency for Asylum’s (EUAA) Practical Guide on the Accelerated Examination Procedure explicitly stating that there is a risk of refoulement in countries that cannot ensure the prevention against persecution or serious harm as the death penalty. Nearly 23 people were executed under capital law in Egypt in 2025, and some of these cases have been documented by the Committee for Justice inside Egyptian detention centres and prisons.
In contrast to the EU’s own standards and criteria regarding the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, some SCOs, such as India and Bangladesh, are not parties to the Convention and have not enacted national refugee legislation. Instead, the EU’s SCO legislation requires only that a country provide ‘effective protection’ to asylum seekers. This is an ambiguous and low threshold for ensuring protection against non-refoulement and guaranteeing access to basic rights—which, in practice, does not apply to nationals or asylum seekers living in SCOs.
Unfounded designation criteria
The designation criteria for an SCO involves the assessment of COI from the EUAA, EU member states, the European External Action Service, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other international organisations. The reform also highlights and formally includes a statistical criterion whereby a country may be designated as ‘safe’ if the EU-wide recognition rate for asylum applications by its nationals is below 20%.
This statistical criterion ignores the protection risks faced by survivors of human trafficking and GBV survivors, as well as minority and ethnic groups. Moreover, it increases the risk of discrimination and blocks their right to access to information, thereby undermining the presumption of safety, as they face more barriers to proving their individual risk. For example, survivors may face secondary trauma and fear reprisals against their family members by human trafficking networks or former attackers.
In cases involving GBV and human trafficking, the available COI often does not reveal the hidden nature of GBV. It also faces fragmented information sources and low availability of official records. In addition, COI does not examine the inadequate coverage of these issues in rural and remote areas and does not account for the social and institutional barriers to identifying networks and perpetrators, or to obtaining detailed information on individual cases. The obstacles that survivors face in disclosing abuse and violence reduce the chances of obtaining reliable and direct sources of information.
Furthermore, the SCO legal framework and designation criterion focus on the massive human rights violations and indiscriminate violence, such as armed conflicts, rather than on identifying the structural discrimination, harassment, torture, ill treatment and violence that asylum seekers might be facing. It also neglects to consider human rights violence by non-state actors; for instance, reports have documented persistent violence by non-state actors against SOGIESC persons in Tunisia, including severe physical harm by families and local vigilantes.
Although the SCO framework allows an SCO country to be designated as only partially safe, the current SCO designation has ignored the protection risks affecting several areas of the country. To illustrate, in Western Sahara, there are several reports of attacks against Sahrawi human rights defenders.
Moreover, the process for designating a country as an SCO is static and requires legislative and political support for any adjustments, in contrast to the highly volatile nature of risk situations and changing country dynamics. Although the SCO framework provides for continuous monitoring of the situation in the SCOs to allow for adjustments, the European Commission must first notify the European Council, which must give its prior approval. The process introduces political influence into the designation process, as the European Council could deny any modification on the basis of ‘the potential implications for the external relations of the Union’.
Furthermore, modifying the SCO framework requires political support in the European Parliament and the European Council, which are instead focused on reducing migration flows by promoting border protection, the efficiency of national systems and the security of the EU rather than ensuring the EU abides by its obligations regarding asylum protection. For instance, despite the warnings raised by the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights about structural violence, torture and the death penalty in SCOs, the proposal was approved.
During the European Parliament’s approval process for the SCO amendment, far-right, conservative and centre parties promoted the framework, ignoring the human rights violations faced by asylum seekers to prioritise political and electoral goals aimed at reducing migration flows. The salience of the asylum system and efforts to reduce migration have been instrumentalised by the conservatives, centre-right, and liberals to break down the ‘firewall’ against the far right. The ‘firewall’ is considered an implicit political mechanism of the European political parties to avoid governing in coalition with the far right.
The SCO framework has been used as another layer of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum to portray asylum as a security and managerial issue rather than as a matter of ensuring the protection of human rights. It has been falsely argued that the SCO framework will ensure a ‘more efficient and robust’ system and a safer Europe.
Procedural lack of safeguards
Contrary to the principle of non-discrimination, the SCO framework does not guarantee equal access to application procedures based on the applicant’s nationality. Moreover, in practice, accelerated procedures do not ensure fair treatment and assessment of applications, and there have been reports of weak credibility assessments. These assessments are conducted in formats that resemble interrogations, focusing on the identification of vulnerabilities rather than on the need for international protection, with a lack of prospective assessment of the applicant’s situation. There have also been reports of bias, as well as a lack of transparency and selectivity in the evidentiary assessment carried out by interviewers during accelerated procedures.
Credibility assessments are short and swift, focusing on visible aspects of the applicant’s statement, behaviour and documentation. In the implementation of accelerated procedures, a significant emphasis has been placed on documenting health issues and on identifying ‘evident’ and ‘apparent’ cases.
Although the EUAA’s Practical Guide on the Accelerated Examination Procedure contemplates providing information on timelines, stages and rights during the accelerated process, the information is not transparent and is difficult for applicants to understand. Furthermore, in the implementation of accelerated procedures, asylum seekers are often not well informed and do not receive clear, easy-to-understand information about the accelerated procedure, despite this constituting one of their procedural rights.
The short time limit for conducting accelerated procedure assessments does not allow for the identification of psychological facts and trauma regarding torture and survivors of human trafficking, sexual violence and SOGIESC persons, who may otherwise remain undetected. For instance, survivors of human trafficking often develop psychological and emotional coping mechanisms to conceal their traumatic experiences. In some cases, survivors internalise rehearsed stories and responses for fear of being detained and forcibly returned due to their altered perception of reality or their undocumented status in the host country. These psychological mechanisms can be misinterpreted by interviewers as being uncooperative or deceitful.
Furthermore, the SCO framework prevents asylum applicants from receiving a fair, individual assessment of their claims by the EU, placing a higher burden on them to prove their claims. Moreover, applicants have reduced access to resources and time, including information, lawyers, legal counselling and representation, translation and legal support, making it more difficult for applicants to support their cases. For example, cases based on the refugee ground of ‘membership of a particular social group’ leave asylum seekers in more precarious and vulnerable situations, putting them at risk of being deported and deprived of the protection they need.
There is a high risk that applications related to complex and sensitive cases – such as the ones linked to GBV, sexual orientation and diversity, discrimination and human trafficking – will be refused. For instance, quality concerns regarding the implementation of accelerated procedures in Germany include high rates of approval after litigation, with ‘more than 75%’ of subsidiary protection holders’ appeals being upheld by the courts. This is linked to flaws in the integrity of the accelerated procedure process, which could be compromised by decisions made with only partial information available.
Moreover, applicants could be affected by the elimination of the suspensive effect of appeals while their appeals are pending. As a result, applicants may face a severe risk of violence, torture and human rights violations in their home countries due to arbitrary and discriminatory decisions made without an individualised assessment of their claims.
The SCO framework also allows for the application of the border procedure, which involves detention and restrictions on mobility in processing areas at the border. It also includes that the asylum process must be conducted entirely within these designated areas, including appeals and return decisions.
The border procedure includes a fast-tracked asylum assessment that restricts access to free legal assistance and imposes additional hurdles for applicants in border areas, those relocated to processing areas or those placed in detention. Although detention should be an exceptional measure due to the risk of violating fundamental rights, including the rights to freedom and mobility, the border procedure nevertheless includes this severe measure. Moreover, the border procedure does not provide alternatives to detention that would ensure greater compliance by applicants while lowering costs.
The border procedure also poses risks to the mental health of children, has negative effects on child development, damages family relationships and risks chain refoulement from occurring. Reports indicate that the implementation of asylum procedures in border areas has resulted in children being subjected to adult procedures because of limited response capacity and inadequate infrastructure.
Finally, there is insufficient monitoring of the risk of human rights violations at the EU’s borders, including pushbacks, refoulement, abuses of authority and compliance with procedural fairness and safeguards due to the absence of independent human rights monitoring mechanisms in many EU member states. According to Human Rights Watch, as of 12 June 2026, many states did not implement independent human rights monitoring, despite this being a requirement for the implementation of accelerated procedures under the framework of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. Moreover, it is not clear if the current national arrangements adopted in Greece, Croatia, Poland, Hungary and Spain would comply with the current framework of the pact.
Conclusions
The SCO framework promotes the development of a coercive and restrictive system that aims to deter asylum seekers from seeking protection in Europe. The punitive and criminalising approach promoted by the political coalition with the far right generates a false public perception of effectiveness and security among the electorate by appearing to reduce the number of asylum seekers in Europe. Nevertheless, these restrictive measures will lead to greater exclusion and discrimination of refugees and asylum seekers in the EU.
Moreover, the SCO framework poses serious risks for refugees and asylum seekers, including the risk of torture, ill-treatment and widespread human rights violations that expose them to refoulement, physical harm and irreparable harm. However, the framework ignores these risks by relying on a statistical criterion that fails to account for individual risk. Refugees and asylum seekers are exposed to civil unrest, political instability, authoritarian regimes, political persecution, discrimination and physical harm from state and non-state actors in their home countries. These risks are deliberately ignored by the EU, as SCO governments are seen as useful for externalisation practices or are pressured to comply with the EU’s deterrence goals. The concept of ‘safety’ is used as a political instrument to shape asylum governance, not to comply with refugee rights.
Finally, the SCO framework leaves refugees and asylum seekers in an unfair and discriminatory system that disregards due process principles and does not guarantee protection against torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment – particularly for structurally and historically discriminated populations such as SOGIESC persons, survivors of human trafficking and survivors of sexual and GBV. The accelerated procedure substantially reduces procedural safeguards in the asylum process, undermining refugee status determination and the rights of refugees and asylum seekers while contributing to a sharp decline in asylum petitions.
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