Turmoil in the North African Refugee Regime

The architecture of northern Africa’s migration control set-up and the overall refugee regime currently in place is about to undergo substantial transformation ― with potentially far-reaching consequences. After years of unsuccessful attempts by the EU Commission to persuade North African countries bordering the EU to adopt asylum laws, Egypt surprisingly and swiftly pushed such legislation through its parliament in 2024. In December, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ratified the vaguely worded bill that is to transfer refugee status determination (RSD) and asylum recognition procedures from the UN refugee agency UNHCR to the Egyptian state. The UNHCR office in Algiers has now confirmed, for the first time, that Algeria’s government is also working on similar legislation.

“While UNHCR is not directly involved in the drafting process, we continue to offer technical support and expertise to the Algerian authorities to align the legislation with international standards”, the UN agency’s Algeria office told the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in an email. “Discussions are ongoing to determine the most effective ways UNHCR can contribute to this process. At this stage, we do not have information on a specific roadmap or the content of the proposed law.”

The legislative process is clearly still at a very early stage. Algerian government officials first announced their intention to draft such a law during the 2023 edition of the Global Refugee Forum, a UNHCR conference held annually in Geneva. Regarding the asylum law, a strategy paper published by UNHCR’s Algeria office in January 2025 vaguely states that the UN agency “will endeavor to expand access to asylum, registration, and documentation” in Algeria, either “jointly” with the government or “by the Government”.

In fact, UNHCR’s role remains unclear once these laws take effect in both Algeria and Egypt. In Cairo, too, there is still a lack of clarity regarding UNHCR’s future role, as in addition to the law that has already been ratified, bylaws to the legislation are also to be adopted. However, so far, the government has neither drafted nor adopted those bylaws.

European Deportation Fantasia

Meanwhile, the EU ― together with UNHCR ― has actively promoted drafting processes for such laws in the region since the 2010s. After Algeria worked on a draft asylum law as early as 2012, Morocco finalized a draft bill in 2014, while Tunisia presented a draft in 2017. In all three cases, however, the drafts were never submitted to the respective parliament for a vote or to the government for ratification; ultimately, all three projects were shelved. EU states hope that such legislation would enable them to externalize asylum procedures to northern Africa and thus stem the flow of people on the move towards Europe. According to the Dublin regulation logic, it would be easier for European states to classify authoritarian states as “safe” if they were to implement asylum laws.

While almost the entire support and aid infrastructure for people on the move in these three countries has now been shut down, UNHCR and the UN-associated International Organization for Migration may soon be limited to providing only minimal assistance to those in urgent need.

However, European fantasies of deporting third-country nationals to North African “transit states”, as the border regime jargon so nicely puts it, can be ruled out for the time being, given the firm refusal of the governments in Cairo, Algiers, or Tunis to play along. Proposals to set up “disembarkation platforms” ― entailing hotspots or externalized asylum processing centres run by EU states in northern Africa, and an idea regularly floated since the early 2000s by European officials ― also continue to be rejected by these governments.

Coordinated Migration Control

Despite this staunch opposition to certain elements of the European border being externalized to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, North African governments are willingly integrated into the EU border regime in other areas. Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya are now increasingly coordinating their (anti-)migration policies with each other as well as within the framework of a joint alliance with Italy, their key partner in Europe. At a high-level summit in Tunis in April 2024, Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, Tunisia’s head of state Kais Saied, and Mohamed al-Menfi, who governs western Libya, agreed that they would henceforth align their (anti-)migration policies. Just weeks later, the interior ministers of the three states met with their Italian counterpart in Rome, also with the aim of further expanding migration control coordination.

This increasingly institutionalized coordination of reprisals against people on the move, led by Algeria, was triggered by Tunisia’s sudden turnaround regarding migration control in early 2023, as Algeria has since been confronted with thousands of deported people on its northeastern border. Until 2023, Tunisia-based people on the move were, as is the case in all other northern African countries, kept in a state of manufactured precarity — but the Tunisian state remained mostly passive and only deported people to Algeria or Libya via its southern land borders in some isolated cases. On the Algerian–Tunisian border, people used to irregularly cross only in one direction; from Algeria to Tunisia. Since 2023, however, mass deportations to the southern or western borderlands have also become routine in Tunisia. According to the World Organization against Torture (OMCT), Tunisian authorities deported more than 9,000 people to the Tunisian–Algerian borderlands and at least 7,000 people to the Tunisian–Libyan border in 2024 alone.

Militias allied with Libya’s two competing governments in Tripoli and Tobruk are also increasingly carrying out mass expulsion campaigns to Chad, Niger, or Sudan, while Algeria has continued its systematic mass deportations to Niger, which have been carried out on an almost weekly basis since 2017. At least 31,404 people were deported to Niger by Algerian authorities in 2024, according to the activist network Alarme Phone Sahara. Algeria is now also frequently expelling people to Libya. Since early 2024, at least 1,800 people have been intercepted by Libyan militias at the Algerian border and were detained in the city of Ghadames, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous.

All three states have also closed or criminalized almost all civil support and aid infrastructure for undocumented people within their respective territories. In Algeria, almost all organizations that had previously campaigned for the rights of people on the move ― above all the Algerian Human Rights League (LADDH) and the youth association RAJ ― were banned by the courts in 2022. Aid NGOs such as Caritas, which provided emergency aid to those in urgent need, were also forced to shut their doors for unspecified reasons.

While the crackdown on civic space in Algeria materialized in the context of the counter-revolutionary dynamics following the failure of the Hirak protests (whose name stems from the Arabic word for “movement”) in 2020, civil society organizations in Tunisia and Libya were closed down explicitly due to their work with people on the move. Since 2023, the Tunisian state has deliberately shut down NGOs that for years offered emergency accommodation, medical assistance, or legal advice for undocumented people; it also prosecuted their leaders. In Libya, the offices of at least ten foreign aid organizations working in the field of migration were forced to shut down as recently as April 2025.

Turning into a Mere Service Provider

While almost the entire support and aid infrastructure for people on the move in these three countries has now been or is being shut down, and deportations are taking place at a pace rarely seen before, UNHCR and the UN-associated International Organization for Migration (IOM) may soon be limited to providing only minimal assistance to those in urgent need. Since 2023, even the border regime service provider IOM has had less room to manoeuvre in Algeria and Tunisia, and the organization is increasingly being forced to focus almost exclusively on its de facto core activity in the region: the so-called “voluntary return” deportation operations, primarily to West or Central African countries.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear what role UNHCR might play once the asylum laws come into force in both countries. Despite Europe’s deportation fantasies, Algeria and Egypt are pursuing their own ― albeit partly divergent ― goals by pushing forward national asylum legislation. “By adopting such a law, Egypt might want to gain a greater degree of control over refugee and asylum matters, rather than delegating responsibility to UNHCR”, former UNHCR official Jeff Crisp told the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. “At the same time, the government has an interest in keeping UNHCR involved in asylum-related matters in order to access the international resources that UNHCR is able to mobilize. Additionally, UNHCR’s involvement provides governments with an important degree of legitimacy, helping them to counter any criticism of the way they treat refugees or asylum seekers.”

Algeria is to maintain its selective approach towards refugee recognition while continuing its crackdown on people of nationalities the state considers ineligible for international refugee protection.

Egypt seems to be following the example set by Turkey, where an asylum law came into force in 2014. According to critics, it does not offer adequate refugee protection, but rather gradually eliminated UNHCR as a decision-making authority when it comes to the status of Turkey-based refugees, and the law was primarily enforced in the context of the government’s nationalist and geopolitical interests as well as the Turkey–EU deal.

Selective Refugee Protection

While Egypt also appears to be using its asylum law as a bargaining chip in loan and investment negotiations with its European partners, Algiers, in contrast, is not dependent on loans or financial injections from Western or international partners. It apparently intends to push ahead with such a law to keep a closer eye on UNHCR’s Algeria office in the future.

In Egypt, the new asylum bill provides for the establishment of a state authority charged with refugee issues, the Permanent Committee for Refugee Affairs (PCRA), as no such entity existed in Egypt until that point. Algeria, on the other hand, has had such an agency in place since 1963, the Algerian Bureau for Refugees and Stateless Persons (BAPRA), which is subordinated to Algeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the asylum law, the government appears to aim at regulating and monitoring the UNHCR’s asylum processing more closely, possibly by providing BAPRA with a stronger mandate.

That said, neither the law nor a possible future BAPRA with expanded powers will be able to significantly alter Algeria’s selective application of the 1951/1967 international refugee regime ratified by the government. Refugee policy in Algeria has always been a manifestation of the “anti-imperialist strategies of Algerian foreign policy”, while the state’s support for the decolonization of Western Sahara ― and to a certain extent also Palestine ― remains a “rare relic of Algeria’s anti-imperialist period”, as the political scientist Salim Chena put it in 2011.

In fact, the asylum recognition practices of UNHCR and BAPRA precisely reflect this foreign policy appropriation of the international refugee protection regime in Algeria. While 173,600 people from Western Sahara and 7,866 Syrians have been granted refugee status by UNHCR Algeria, the number of people from all other countries recognized as refugees or asylum seekers by the UN agency remains marginal. As of 2024, fewer than 3,000 people of other nationalities were recognized as refugees or asylum seekers in the country. People who entered the country irregularly from West or Central African countries — most of whom seek work in Algeria, while some continue their travel towards Europe after temporary stays — will have little chance of obtaining asylum or regular residence permits in the future regardless of whether an asylum law is in place.

Thus, Algeria is to maintain its selective approach towards refugee recognition while continuing its crackdown on people of nationalities the state considers ineligible for international refugee protection. Deportation practices in Algeria are used as a deterrent for those crossing the country on their way north as well as a means to remove people from its territory. These people are now increasingly stuck in North Africa, as Tunisia has since 2023 enacted a de facto closure of its maritime borders for Italy-bound irregular migration, and has also started to deport people to the Algerian border.