CURRENT AFFAIRS
The identification knot: why deportation often remains only a paper threat
30 July 2026 — Ceuta / European Union
Every time hundreds of people climb a border fence or swim across it, public debate immediately shifts to one word: deportation. But deporting someone requires two conditions rarely mentioned alongside the political proclamation — knowing with certainty where the person comes from, and having an agreement in force with that specific state to send them back. When either condition is missing, deportation is not a difficult option: it is an option that does not exist.
Facts
On Thursday 30 July 2026, thousands of young people gathered at the border between Castillejos (Morocco) and Ceuta; hundreds climbed the protective fences, unguarded by police at that moment, while Moroccan auxiliary forces withdrew as the young people passed — an episode the security officers questioned by EFE could not explain, except for its coincidence with Morocco's Throne Day. It is the latest in a sequence: over the past fifteen days Ceuta has recorded more than 1,500 arrivals, with unaccompanied-minor centres overcrowded by 1,600%.
The European Parliament lists identifying migrants and obtaining travel documents from non-EU authorities among the main practical obstacles to return — in 2022 alone, 141,060 people were refused entry to the EU. The technical mechanism meant to solve the problem already exists: Frontex staff record data in the Visa Information System and fingerprints in EURODAC at external borders, then contact third states to identify people and obtain their documents; there is also a database, MIDAS, partly EU-funded, aiming to link up with the West African Police Information System, itself funded by Brussels to collect biometric data across seventeen countries. But technology is not enough if the second piece is missing: a readmission agreement genuinely in force. The 1992 Spain-Morocco agreement, for instance, does not apply to Moroccan nationals as such, only to third-country nationals who transited through Morocco — a distinction that in practice shifts the whole problem onto verifying real, not just declared, nationality. An Italian case, though older, shows the same dynamic at scale: despite a Rome-Algiers agreement in force since 2003, only 245 returns were carried out between 2015 and 2017 against over 4,000 expulsion orders, and a substantial share of people in irregular status come from countries with which Italy has no return agreement at all, so every negotiation runs solely through embassies and consulates, often without result. More recent, 2026 data shows the ratio between people landing in Italy and returns actually carried out rose from 10.2% in 2025 to 34.8% in 2026 — an improvement that still leaves the vast majority of cases uncovered. According to the European Commission, today only around 20% of people subject to a return decision actually leave EU territory.
Legal commentary
International law does not require a state to accept back whoever is presented to it: a forced return requires a legal title — a bilateral agreement or a multilateral readmission mechanism — that identifies with certainty the state responsible for receiving the person. Without that title, or without certain identification of nationality, an expulsion order remains an administrative act with no practical enforceability: this is where the gap between political proclamation and legal reality becomes structural, not incidental. The new Return Regulation, approved at first reading by the European Parliament in April 2026, explicitly acknowledges the problem by banning the use of aliases or forged documents and requiring the surrender of personal documents even in digital form — a sign that concealing one's identity, deliberate or not, is common enough to require a dedicated rule, with penalties reaching up to 24 months of administrative detention. But the crack does not open only on the side of the person in transit: a 2021 European Court of Auditors report already found that progress on readmission agreements between the EU and third countries remains modest, and that weak cooperation with countries of origin — not just individual non-cooperation — contributes to the low number of returns actually carried out.
Implications
What emerges is not a single border episode but the very shape of the public debate on migration. Promising large-scale deportations without the two conditions that make them genuinely enforceable — certain identification and a bilateral agreement in force — means offering a solution that does not exist in the form it is sold in. This is not a marginal technicality: readmission agreements must be negotiated state by state, identification requires time and consular cooperation that is not always available, and every forced return carries a non-trivial cost to the public purse. When these three knots — bilateral deals, identifying the person, costs — stay out of the proclamation, the debate stops being a search for a solution and becomes a display of firmness: the promised number matters more than the enforceable one — the same mechanism already described elsewhere on this site regarding the externalisation of the European border: moving the problem elsewhere costs less, politically, than solving it.
One point needs care: the reason a person enters another country — fleeing war, seeking better living conditions, or any other motive — does not affect the structural nature of the problem. A system that cannot certainly identify who enters it, and that has no readmission agreement with the country of origin, remains ineffective regardless of why that person left: the crack is in the mechanism, not in the motive of whoever crosses it.
The extreme case proves it. A person born and raised in a refugee camp, of uncertain origin-nationality or never registered at birth, is not automatically stateless in the legal sense — statelessness is a legal condition (no state considers the person its own national), not simply the absence of a document in one's pocket — but falls into a real, documented category: a person at risk of statelessness, for whom the inability to prove citizenship or ties to a state is itself a recognised indicator. If the asylum claim is rejected and the statelessness recognition claim is not accepted — or cannot even be lodged, because the minimal documents required to file it are exactly what is missing — this person remains in a real condition with no clear legal box: neither a recognised refugee, nor a recognised stateless person, nor deportable, because there is no certain state to hand them back to. This is not a theoretical exception: it is proof that the identification knot can be structurally unsolvable, not merely slow or badly managed.
It must be said with equal clarity: non-cooperation can also be a deliberate strategy. Lying about one's identity or origin, or changing it during the procedure, is a recognised behaviour, sanctioned by the new EU Regulation. But the very organisation that closely follows the rule's application notes that the same cooperation duties — documents, a stable address, regular appearances — are often impossible to meet for people without a fixed residence, without digital tools, or without identity documents for reasons that have nothing to do with choice. In effect, the rule sanctions calculated lying and structural impossibility in the same way, because from the outside — and often from inside the procedure itself — the two conditions are not easily told apart. It is perhaps the most uncomfortable point of the whole picture: the system does not, today, have a reliable tool to separate those exploiting the crack from those who simply fell into it.
One last observation remains, perhaps the sharpest for those who design these measures as a deterrent. Twenty-four months of administrative detention, reduced benefits, entry bans: for someone who decides to leave after weighing the risks of a dangerous journey and the costs of an economic migration project, these are real consequences that can weigh on the choice. But for someone fleeing war, hunger or the risk of death, the calculation is of a different nature: administrative detention, however harsh, is still a place with a roof and a meal — not a comparable alternative to the threat being fled. This is not an isolated impression: research on the subject finds a documented gap between the goals of restrictive migration policies and the results actually achieved, and a direct precedent confirms it — the end of the Mare Nostrum sea-rescue operation in 2014 did not reduce departures as its architects had predicted. If the deterrent does not deter those fleeing death, the whole sanctioning apparatus ends up mainly hitting those trapped in the system — not those who evade it by calculation, but those who, in their own calculation before leaving, had no workable threshold of deterrence at all.
The facts
On 11 June 2026 the Advocate General of the EU Court of Justice, Laila Medina, delivered her opinion on the case of two migrants detained in the Italian centres in Albania, referred by the Rome Court of Appeal. She confirms that locating the centres in Albania is legitimate, but that compliance with the minimum standards of treatment required by EU law is not proven. It is the second opinion after the more favourable one of April 2026.
Legal comment
The Advocate General's opinion does not bind the judges: the final judgment is expected in the coming months and could overturn it. The CJEU ruling of 1 August 2025 (cases C-758/24 and C-759/24), which limited the designation of "safe countries", remains in force. The status of the Albanian scheme is therefore contested, not settled.
Implications
The centres, operational since October 2024, have sat largely empty due to judicial halts. For critics the scheme violates the right to asylum, creates an accountability void and raises a problem of sovereignty.
Sources: Infobae (30 Jul 2026) · Euronews (30 Jul 2026) · European Parliament · Statewatch · CEAR · Panorama · L'Opinione (28 Jul 2026) · Centre for Human Rights, University of Padua · European Court of Auditors · UNHCR Italy · ASGI · Welforum · Europa Today · Open Migration · Amnesty International