Autocracies or Democracies - Who is Cooperating More with the EU on the Forcible Return of Migrants?

The return of third country nationals has become a core objective of the EU’s migration policy. In order to return persons who are not eligible for international protection, the EU and its member states need to cooperate with third countries. There is a broad scholarly debate on the EU’s cooperation with democracies and autocracies but rarely with a focus on EU return issues. Because of the principle of non-refoulement, we may assume that EU member states are not cooperating with countries where the migrants’ lives are in danger once returned. However, what about countries that are not full autocracies? And how is the cooperation with the EU altered if a (formally) democratic state becomes more authoritarian? In this article, we juxtapose democratic indices with the return rate – the measurement between the people who have to leave EU territory and those who are actually returned – and other statistics. We take a comparative look on the whole world over a period of eleven years (the total for which EU return data is available). By doing so, we create a unique data set on EU return cooperation. Our results show that the EU tends to cooperate more with democratic than authoritarian countries, albeit not exclusively. Furthermore, changes in the level of democracy only rarely have a direct impact on the return rate (and only in some regions). Other factors like voluntary return confound the return rate with autocratic countries, making it a flawed measurement to assess EU return cooperation with fully autocratic countries.