Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Ordinary meeting
14 July 2026
Contents updated on 14 Jul 2026
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
Official source
Offset
Transcript offset
0s
Text size
Export
Replay
Versions of this video
Transcripts may differ slightly from one version to another.
LIBE European Parliament
Follow its sittings09:38 - 11:06
Speaker 2
Well, good morning, dear colleagues. We continue our session now on point number eight, which is exchange of views on the IT return case management system. The Commission's common implementation plan for the Pact on Migration and Asylum foresees that by mid-2026, Frontex will assist all Member States to put in place an IT return case management system. And the aim of this exchange of views is to discuss the state of play of the IT return case management system, in particular in light of the upcoming legislative proposal on the digitalization of the return process, which the Commission is expected to submit by September 2026. For this exchange, I am pleased to welcome Mr. Henrik Nielsen, Director for International Affairs, Returns and Visa at DG HOME, speaking on behalf of the European Commission, and Mr. Hans Leijtens, Executive Director of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, who is joining us remotely today.
So without further ado, I give the floor to Mr. Nielsen for his presentation for up to 10 minutes. Mr. Nielsen, the floor is yours. And by the way, welcome back to the Commission, to the LIBE Committee.
11:06 - 17:20
Speaker 1
Thank you very much, Chairman, always a pleasure to be here and good morning to all members. Indeed, to start with the end, as you mentioned, Chair, we are preparing a legislative proposal on this topic, which for the moment is planned to be presented towards the end of September, at the same time as the proposal to revise the Eurodac Regulation.
The proposal on digitalization of return will be accompanied by a full impact assessment that will look at different options, data protection aspects, and of course the costs and the funding of the initiative. So this is a very opportune moment for us as we are finalizing the proposal to listen to any input and views of the members on this important topic, but it also means of course that nothing is final at this stage. We are still in the preparatory phase when we are working on the proposal and again take into account the outcome of the impact assessment. But in brief, why do we see that as something very important? We think from our side that digitalization will help to accelerate and streamline in fact potentially all our migration processes.
Now we are focusing on return, but we are also reflecting internally on further digitalization of the broader migration and asylum policies to support the member states for the overall implementation of the pact and even more broadly the smooth functioning of the Schengen area. So we think here we have a clear potential to enhance and in fact enforce EU migration rules, boost the cooperation between member states, and also in fact reduce the administrative burden of member states' national administrations if we go in this direction. Briefly to start a bit to recap what we have or what exists let's say in place because that's our starting point and a bit of apologies in advance for all the acronyms, but that's this kind of world that we have. First of all, what basically all member states have in place is some kind of a digital case management system that supports the return process. This is based on a kind of a basic model developed by Frontex and which is referred to as RECAMAS.
So RECAMAS for return case management. So these are national systems that essentially facilitate the completion of the internal steps at national level of the return process, so the national aspect of that process. It supports the migration authorities throughout the different steps of this internal process to facilitate the retrieval of information also from other relevant EU and national databases that are useful for handling the particular return case. What we do see though is quite a lot of divergence between member states in terms of how effective these different national systems are. So they are very much at different levels in terms of being more or less advanced, more or less effective.
Second, which exists, is in relation to readmission, so the part of the return process dealing with the contacts between the member state and the third country in question to which the person would be returned. There we have in place with certain third countries a readmission case management system, so an RCMS, that helps to effectively translate in a sense or operationalize existing readmission agreements or arrangements to support the different phases of the readmission process. So notably the identification of the third country national, the issuance of travel documents, and the very organization of the return operations. So so far we have this kind of readmission case management systems which have been supported by the EU through funding in place with six different third countries. And one could say again it's a bit asymmetrical between the member states, but all member states use at least one of these systems in relation to the third countries, depends a bit on the caseload and the profiles they have, so one or several.
So that's the RCMS. Third component existing today is related to reintegration. There we have a system developed in fact by the Commission referred to as RIAT, so related to reintegration assistance, which is used by member states and Frontex and to support the very provision of reintegration assistance towards third countries and the third country nationals. So this in a sense standardizes a bit the reintegration management of the member states and also enables a bit of communication between member states, Frontex, as well as the reintegration partners who actually do the reintegration assistance in the third countries in question.
Then of course on top of this to recall that some of our large-scale IT systems are of course also relevant for return. I would just flag in particular Schengen Information System and Eurodac, which are also used as by the Member States as part of the return process. Now, what are the problems that we have identified in in the impact assessment with the existing situation? First of all, we see quite an insufficient sharing of information, let's say between all players, so between authorities within the same Member State, between different Member States, between Member States and Frontex, as well as with third countries. There the information flow and the information sharing is very suboptimal and doesn't really happen.
In fact, between Member States they can of course access information which has been uploaded into our large-scale IT systems because all Member States have access. But if they cannot find the information there, there is no particular channel or system for Member States just to exchange information in bilateral between them. One Member State may have information relevant for a returnee which is in another Member State. There is no system or or any kind of digital channel to to facilitate that kind of exchange. Secondly, a lot of of this process at the Member State level is still happening kind of semi-manually or through repetitive manual tasks.