599 Ricard Zapata-Barrero The external dimension of migration policy in the Mediterranean region: premises for normative debate include political agreements affecting the lives of people who try to migrate, such as, most importantly, re-admission agreements, which is a primary tool for the management of migration flows. Broadly defined, such agreements establish a mutual commitment from each party to welcome back, without any formalities, certain categories of persons at the other party’s request. Their main purpose is to combat irregular entry. Re-admission agreements tend to be bilateral because Member States’ differing legal systems render the multilateral approach too complex.35 Readmission agreements are agreements whereby each party undertakes to welcome back those persons who passed through its territory before illegally entering and living in the territory of the other party. However, it is important to point out that in bilateral agreements, the word “readmission” can have up to three different meanings: firstly, “repatriation”, which means that an illegal immigrant of a state must be readmitted by the country of which he is a citizen; secondly, “readmission”, strictly speaking, refers only to the admission by a state of a non-national who passed through this state on his way to another country where he is an illegal immigrant; and thirdly, “transit”, which refers to the passage of a foreign person through a state on his way to another (usually the state of which he is a national) on his way from the country where he is an illegal immigrant. 1.3.2 External institutions The term “external institutions” refers to the building of structures with the specific functional aim of implementing one or several dimensions of policy externalisation. This institutional structure does not have, in principle, a permanent status, but is circumstantial and pursuant to a political decision. This category encompasses, for instance, camps and processing centres, which have the function of receiving irregular migrants in specifically designated places.36 It also includes immigration offices, which have an added diplomatic dimension given their aim of establishing contact between the potential immigrant and the receiving country before the migra-tory process is embarked upon, as well as other border control institutions, which may 35 HURWITZ, Agnes. “The Externalization of EU Policies on Migration and Asylum: Re-admission Agreements and Comprehensive Approaches”, paper presented at the UNU-WIDER Conference “Poverty, International Migration and Asylum”, Helsinki, 27-28 September 2002 (full text of the conference is available at: ; http://archive.unu.edu/update/downloads/43wider1.pdf 36 While “camps” is the familiar name spread by NGOs, the official name is “centres of temporary stay” or “reception centres”.
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