EUROPEAN parliamentarians voted today to ease the setting up of new migrant detention centres outside the European Union, known as “return hubs.”

MEPs voted 389-206 in favour, with 32 abstentions. 

Right-wing parties allied with far-right groups that they had previously shunned to pass the measure, while parties of the left and centre voted against.

Any EU nation can now negotiate on its own or in small coalitions to deport migrants seeking safety from war and persecution, not to their home countries but to facilities yet to be built outside the 27-nation bloc.

Already, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Denmark have entered negotiations with governments mainly in Africa to host sites to hold migrants denied asylum.

Far-right parties in Europe have praised the deportation policies of US President Donald Trump and have called for the EU to adopt a similar approach.

Human rights groups say migrants are being brutalised and pushed back illegally at EU borders, while legal protections are increasingly being hollowed out.

Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee said the vote was “a historic setback for refugee rights.”

She warned it would “pave the way towards a new punitive EU asylum and migration regime, designed to deter, detain and deport people seeking safety.”

“The EU should stand for a system that protects lives, not one that criminalises survival,” she said.

French lawmaker Melissa Camara, who voted against the measure, said it passed only by centrist groups allying with the far-right.

“History will remember that the so-called moderate right-wing group sounded the death knell of what remained of the cordon sanitaire,” she said, adding that “return hubs” are places far from Europe “where fundamental rights cannot be effectively monitored.”