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Each year the Member States of the European Union issue around 500,000 return decisions to persons who do not, or no longer, have legal stay. A return decision requires the person to leave the territory of the state issuing the return decision and to go to a country where he/she does have legal stay, usually his/her country of citizenship. If persons do not leave themselves, they risk being returned by force. The implementation of assisted and forced return often requires cooperation by the countries of citizenship of the person receiving the return decision, and thus partially depends on the intergovernmental relations between EU+ (EU Member States plus Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) and non-EU+ countries. The WODC has conducted three interrelated studies on the influence of these relations on return.
Having developed a fitting analytical strategy, and with awareness of the data’s limitations, Part 2 (Leerkes, Maliepaard and Van der Meer, 2022) set about answering the main research questions of the project. We employed advanced quantitative analysis to estimate the effects of different intergovernmental return frameworks on the rate of enforced return from EU+ countries to non-EU+ countries. The term intergovernmental return framework pertains to all texts in which states describe how they will cooperate on enforced return (examples are ‘Readmission Agreement’, ‘Memorandum of Understanding’, ‘Mobility Partnership’, ‘Exchange of letters’, and so forth).
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