EU–Nigeria deportation deal awaits MEPs

EU migration commissioner Magnus Brunner and Nigerian foreign minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu signed the first EU–Nigeria readmission agreement in Abuja on Tuesday, 10 November, Austrian broadcaster ORF reported (ORF). The deal is meant to speed up deportations of Nigerians who have no right to stay in Europe. For now it has no legal force, its rules are withheld from the public, and deportations still depend on travel documents that only Nigerian officials can issue.

A signed text nobody outside can read

A readmission agreement commits a country to take back people who have no right to remain in the other side's territory, once a lawful order to leave exists. It does not decide who qualifies for asylum. Those rules stay as they are.

Tuesday's signature is the first of three steps. The Council (where national ministers sit) authorised it only "subject to conclusion," meaning final approval comes later (Council signing decision). The sequence then runs as follows: MEPs must consent first, and only after that can ministers give their final approval (Council note).

The public cannot judge what those votes would approve. The signed text, ST 12944/26, is marked LIMITE, the Council's label for documents restricted from public access, and the Council will release it only alongside the final approval decision (Austrian parliament).

The only public account of the draft came from Ireland's Minister of State Colm Brophy. He told the Dáil, Ireland's lower house, that it sets deadlines for issuing travel documents and also covers some stateless people and third-country nationals, meaning people who are neither Nigerian nor EU citizens (Dáil debate). Those deadlines are the part that could change outcomes. But this was a minister's summary of a draft, not the signed clauses.

Why it took a decade

Ministers gave the Commission its mandate to negotiate on 12 September 2016. As late as 2024, the Council's progress report still listed a question awaiting an answer from Nigeria's Justice Ministry (Council 2024 report).

Abuja wanted more than a returns treaty. Its foreign ministry pressed for reintegration support for returnees, infrastructure help and wider legal routes for Nigerians to work in Europe (Nigerian Foreign Ministry). When negotiators initialled the text on 23 March 2026, the joint communiqué pushed legal migration and visa talks into future work (March communiqué).

That leaves each side holding something the other needs. Nigeria's wish list depends on later European decisions, many of them taken in national capitals. Europe still needs Nigerian cooperation for any deportee who arrives without a valid passport.

The gap between orders and departures

Returns already happen without the treaty. A charter flight monitored by Italy's detention watchdog landed in Lagos on 26 September carrying 58 people, 46 of them from Italy (Italian return monitor).

The scale problem is visible in a restricted Commission assessment published by Statewatch. In 2023, EU countries issued 11,120 orders to leave concerning Nigerians but carried out 1,175 returns, alongside 1,873 requests to Nigeria to take people back and 857 emergency travel documents issued (Statewatch). These counts do not track the same people over time. They show a large gap between orders and completed returns, but they cannot show where individual cases get stuck.

Past experience gives little reason to expect a signature alone to close that gap. The European Court of Auditors found that between 2014 and 2018 Nigeria's average return rate was roughly 25%, and that return rates did not neatly follow progress in readmission talks (European Court of Auditors).

Some coverage has run ahead of the evidence. De Telegraaf, a Dutch daily, reported that rejected migrants would be sent back within 30 days (De Telegraaf). That 30-day figure comes from the separate Samoa Agreement, the EU's partnership treaty with African, Caribbean and Pacific states. There it sets a deadline for answering a return request, not for putting anyone on a plane (Samoa Agreement).

The treaty Brunner signed puts in writing a process that Italy and others already run case by case. Its only possible advantage lies in shared deadlines and document rules that no outsider has read. Before MEPs vote, the Council has to put that text in front of them, and it should publish it at final approval as promised. The Commission, whose own assessment produced the 2023 figures, is the body able to show whether requests, documents and completed returns actually rise afterwards. Until both happen, faster deportations to Nigeria remain an official promise, and the signature by itself proves nothing about speed.