Undoing asylum: Syria after Assad and the collapse of refugee protections

The fall of Assad in late 2024 was seen as a potential turning point for Syrians after over a decade of war and displacement. But European governments moved quickly to redirect the moment. Within hours, Germany suspended Syrian asylum decisions, triggering a wave of similar policy shifts across the continent. These measures replaced rights-based protection with return schemes shaped by electoral politics and framed as pragmatic responses to regime change.

The reality in Syria, however, stands in stark contrast to this political framing. The structural causes of displacement: state collapse, insecurity, and sectarian tension, remain deeply embedded. In March 2025, massacres of Alawite civilians forced 40,000 people to flee to Lebanon. In the months after, a suicide bombing in a church in Damascus, mass killings of Druze in the south, and political tensions in the northeast revived fears of renewed conflict. These are not the signs of a country ready for return.

Repatriation under these conditions puts lives at risk and undermines global migration commitments, including those of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), which emphasize voluntary, safe, and dignified return as part of a multilateral approach to migration justice.
 

EU Offloading Responsibility

The EU’s response to Assad’s fall has been swift and politically opportunistic. Besides Germany’s rushed decision to revise its asylum stance, Austria followed with financial incentives and carried out its first deportation to Damascus in years. Denmark revived and expanded its so-called voluntary return programme, offering up to €27,000 to Syrians willing to leave. These moves, framed as pragmatic responses to a “stabilised” Syria, proceeded without credible security assessments, and despite warnings from the UN special envoy about Syria’s continued fragility.

This return push is not new. It is the latest iteration of Europe’s long-standing containment strategy that started years before Assad’s fall. Between 2019 and 2021, Denmark had already declared parts of Syria “safe”, despite ongoing persecution by the Assad regime. As for Greece, adhering to a hard-line deterrence doctrine since 2019, has escalated pushbacks and restricted asylum access through successive crises.

Offshore, the EU has doubled down on its externalisation policy. From the 2016 EU–Turkey deal to bilateral arrangements with Lebanon, Libya and others, the EU has outsourced border control to third-party countries in exchange for funding. This approach allows the EU to evade responsibility while placing refugees at greater risk.

Rather than recalibrating asylum policies in light of international human rights obligations, European governments are seizing Syria’s regime change to repackage longstanding strategies of exclusion. The push for return is being cast as the logical response to Syria’s political transition, overlooking a basic truth: without guarantees of safety, legal protection, and access to livelihood, return is neither voluntary nor sustainable. Coerced repatriation risks violating the principle of non-refoulement and further destabilizing Syria’s fragile recovery.
 

Shrinking Support, Growing Danger

Meanwhile, the collapse of humanitarian funding, accelerated by the suspension of US and EU funding, has eroded the minimum conditions needed for safe return. More than 170 health facilities in Syria are at risk of closure, jeopardizing access to essential care for over four million people. Conditions in host countries are also deteriorating.

In Lebanon, protection is being quietly dismantled. Since early 2025, UNHCR cash assistance has been cut by 65 percent, and only 21 percent of the refugee response plan is currently funded. These cuts are not merely the result of donor fatigue, but function as pressure tactics, pushing Syrians toward return regardless of safety. They are not policy failures, but seemingly an extension of a long-standing deterrence agenda, now repackaged as a post-conflict return strategy.
 

Gendered Risks

For women, return carries specific and heightened risks. Many who sought safety and autonomy abroad, including women who divorced or secured legal protections in host countries like Germany, face the possibility of social stigma, family retaliation, or violence if they return. Syria’s legal and social frameworks still offer little protection for women whose choices abroad are seen as dishonourable by conservative families or communities.

In disregarding these risks, international actors are not merely negligent, but they are complicit in reinforcing gender-based harm. Return policies that ignore these realities contribute to a broader erosion of protection standards, prioritizing political expediency over rights-based responsibility.
 

Justice Begins Before the Journey

A rights-based return process must be voluntary, informed, and phased. It cannot be driven by political timelines or diplomatic gestures. Return should only begin when conditions on the ground such as physical security, legal protection, access to services, and the ability to rebuild a dignified life are genuinely in place.

Durable return requires regional cooperation beyond fragmented deals and symbolic coordination. Host governments, UN agencies, Syrian civil society, local authorities, and the Syrian government itself must engage meaningfully to rebuild infrastructure, enable social and economic reintegration, and resolve outstanding housing and land claims.

As global actors reaffirm commitments to rights-based migration governance in forums like the GFMD, the case of Syria underscores the urgent need to align political decisions with international legal obligations and ensure that return frameworks are grounded in multilateral cooperation, not unilateral retreat.