The Odysseus Network has always strived to ensure that the Odysseus Summer School always reflects the most relevant knowledge, tackling legal updates, and reflecting emerging research in the academic field. To this end, we would like to draw your attention to two recent updates to the curriculum:
Presentation of Prof. Emilie McDonnel’s book: “Protecting the right to Leave in an era of Externalised Migration Control”
This book explores the human right to leave any country – including one’s own – in international law, and its applicability to externalised migration control. While an important right, this issue is often neglected in the modern day, and this book serves as an excellent entry that fills the literature gap and provides an in-depth analysis of the matter.
It develops a framework for interpreting the right and demonstrates how various externalisation measures violate it, leading to the international responsibility of states and international organisations.
Analysing the work of international and regional systems enshrining the right and examining global externalisation practices, it demonstrates the radical reform required by states and international organisations to comply with the right to leave. Implementing the author’s recommendations would compel the dismantlement of many current externalisation strategies and a re-imagining of the global (im)mobility regime.
This book offers compelling insights for lawyers in the fields of international law, human rights and refugee law, as well as migration policymakers, practitioners and officials.
For a link to the book, click here!
Updated course on Returns and Readmission.
For 18 years, the Return Directive 2008/115/EC has been the EU legal instrument governing returns, and building up a massive body of jurisprudence. Facing the great challenges stress-testing the European Asylum and Migration Management system, and withstanding previous reform proposals, this instrument has weathered through the changing political whims and calls for “innovative solutions.”
However, on the 17th of June 2026, the European Parliament, approved the provisional agreement on the Return Regulation. With only the formal Council approval before the entry into force of the Regulation, it seeks to majorly reform the Directive, introducing lengthy 2-year detentions for certain returnees and lifelong entry bans, removing the automatic suspensive effect of appeals, and establishing a harmonized EU-wide return order. However, the flagship of the Regulation is the authorization for the use of “return hubs” with some plans to enter agreements for such hubs in 2026, with operationalization as early as 2027.
The 2026 Summer School Course on Return and Readmission has been updated and will cover all these developments, ensuring that participants leave the program ready to tackle the changing legal and policy landscape around returns in the European Union.
To see the more, click here!