When Return Means Harm: Why the EU Return Regulation Threatens the Rights of Racialised Queer Youth
This Monday, 9 March 2026, the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee adopted its position on the proposed EU Return Regulation. The Committee’s text would expand the EU’s return framework through a European return order shared across the Schengen area. This would include broader cooperation obligations, detention of up to 24 months, and the possibility of transfers to third countries under return arrangements.
The committee also voted to open interinstitutional negotiations, although that step still needs to be endorsed by the full Parliament before trilogues can begin. The Council already agreed on its own position in December 2025.
Human rights implications
At IGLYO, we are deeply concerned by what this means in practice. This is not a technical update to migration management, nor is its impact limited to asylum procedures alone. Its consequences will be felt most acutely by racialised asylum seekers, including children and young people. This regulation reflects a political choice to move Europe further towards detention, externalisation, surveillance, and punishment to racialised persons, even when they are minors.
Even where the language of the proposal appears administrative, the likely outcome is a harsher system that treats people primarily as cases to be processed and removed, rather than as rights-holders with individual circumstances, relationships, and protection needs.
Human rights actors have already warned that the proposal risks undermining safeguards, expanding coercive measures, and deepening the use of restrictive and punitive approaches to migration control.
Racialised queer youth at serious risk
For racialised queer youth, the dangers are especially dire. Racialised communities in Europe already face entrenched discrimination, including ethnic profiling and racism in policing. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights has documented both racism in policing and high levels of racial discrimination against people of African descent, with racist harassment and profiling reported especially often by young people.
In parallel, OHCHR-backed analysis of the proposed Return Regulation warns that investigative and detection measures can exacerbate discriminatory profiling and undermine access to essential services, healthcare, education, and justice. For young people who are already over-policed or made hypervisible because of race, migration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, sex characteristics, or simply because they are perceived as “different”, expanding migration enforcement is likely to intensify fear and exclusion rather than safety.
European data on racialised queer youth
The risks facing racialised young people are further compounded when sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics are involved. FRA’s data shows that young LGBTQI people already face particularly high levels of discrimination: 53% of young LGBTQI people reported discrimination in at least one area of life in the year before the survey, compared with 41% of adults overall. The figures are even higher for young trans and intersex respondents, at 69% and 62% respectively. FRA also found that young LGBTQI people, and especially those who belong to ethnic or religious minorities, are at greater risk of hate-motivated harassment and other forms of exclusion.
These harms do not exist in isolation. FRA’s youth data also shows that racialised young people experience significant levels of racism across Europe: 37% of young Black people reported racist harassment, and 39% said they felt discriminated against in daily life because of their skin colour, ethnic origin or religion. Among young Muslims, 41% reported harassment, and 44% said they had experienced discrimination in daily life on the same grounds. For racialised LGBTQI young people, these forms of discrimination can overlap in especially harmful ways, deepening insecurity, invisibility, and exclusion.
This has serious consequences for protection and well-being. FRA found that more than a third of LGBTQI people had contemplated suicide in the year before the survey, rising to 62% among young LGBTQI people. At the same time, the EU Agency for Asylum stresses that SOGIESC-based asylum claims require an atmosphere of trust and special procedural guarantees, because trauma, fear, shame, mistrust, and stereotypes can all affect how a person is able to disclose their experiences. A deportation framework built around speed, detention, and compliance moves in the opposite direction, making it harder for racialised queer youth to be protected, and treated with dignity.
Protection of LGBTQI youth
This move towards detention, speed, and reduced safeguards in EU Return Regulation is specially concerning because deportation can expose LGBTQI young people to serious harm and human rights violations, as they could be sent to countries where they may face persecution, violence, criminalisation and lack of effective protection of their rights. Under the principle of non-refoulement in the 1951 Refugee Convention, states must not return individuals to places where they face persecution or serious harm. European and international protection standards already recognise that sexual orientation and gender identity can be grounds for refugee protection, and that these cases require careful, individual assessment rather than fast-track assumptions.
UNHCR recognises claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity within refugee protection, including where people face abuse, persecution, domestic violence, or other serious harms. EUAA likewise notes that LGBTQI people can face discrimination, persecution, and violence in their countries of origin, and that EU asylum law includes specific safeguards for vulnerable applicants, including LGBTQI people.
European courts have reinforced these safeguards. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has confirmed that LGBTQI people may qualify for refugee protection where they face persecution, and that asylum procedures must respect dignity and fundamental rights when assessing such claims. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has likewise held that removing a person to a country where they face serious harm because of their sexual orientation may violate the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment under the European Convention on Human Rights, of which all 27 EU member states are signatories.
Yet the current direction of the Return Regulation risks narrowing the space for those realities to be properly heard. When the system prioritises removal over protection, LGBTQI young people may be returned to places where they are unsafe, forced back into concealment, or cut off from the fragile support networks they have managed to build.
Grave human risks for children
The regulation is also deeply troubling from a child-rights perspective. The committee text allows detention of unaccompanied minors and families with children as a last resort, within a system where detention can last up to 24 months. But UN experts have been clear that immigration detention is never in the best interests of the child and always violates children’s rights.
OHCHR-backed analysis of the proposal also warns that so-called return hubs and transfers to countries with which a person has no genuine connection carry grave human rights risks, especially for children and others with specific vulnerabilities. For racialised LGBTQI children and young people, detention and externalised return are not neutral administrative tools. They are environments where isolation, trauma, discrimination, and exposure to abuse can deepen.
Heightening homelessness among LGBTQI racialised youth
This proposal also risks increasing homelessness and housing insecurity for racialised LGBTQI young people. The European Commission has already recognised that LGBTQI people face disproportionately high rates of homelessness in its EU LGBTIQ Equality Strategy.
In that context, a return system that expands enforcement and detention while discouraging people from seeking support risks pushing already marginalised young people further into precarity, including unsafe housing situations and homelessness. This is particularly alarming because combatting homelessness is already an EU priority.
An urgent call to EU institutions
As this file moves toward plenary endorsement, EU institutions must not ignore the people who will live with its consequences, especially paying attention to its own Equality Strategies. As stated by many other human rights organisations, and European Civil Society Organisations, any return policy must be grounded in dignity, individual assessment, effective remedies, the principle of non-refoulement, and the best interests of the child.
It must also explicitly account for intersecting vulnerabilities, including those faced by racialised LGBTQI young people. Europe cannot claim to advance equality, anti-racism, LGBTQI rights, and children’s rights while building a framework that makes already marginalised young people more precarious and removable.
For us at IGLYO, the message is clear: racialised queer youth deserve protection, solidarity, and rights-based policy, not a system that deepens dehumanisation in the name of migration control.
About IGLYO
IGLYO – The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) Youth & Student Organisation is the world’s largest network of LGBTQI youth and student-led organisations, representing over 135 Members across 40 countries in the Council of Europe region. IGLYO works to ensure that the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQI young people are meaningfully represented in European and international policy spaces, including with institutions such as the European Union and the Council of Europe. iglyo.org
Contact
Rú Ávila Rodríguez (they/them), Deputy Executive Director & Policy & Research Manager, ru@iglyo.org.
