ABSTRACT
In 2002, when the General Secretariat of the Council (GSC) listed the various key criteria that needed to be taken into consideration in order to identify non-EU (or third) countries with which to negotiate EU readmission agreements, it underlined that EU readmission agreements ‘should involve added value for member states in bilateral negotiations’ (European Council 2002: 3) with a given third country (Cassarino 2010: 12; Carrera 2016: 37).
