Against the backdrop of the bilateral cooperation on migration control between EU Member States and third countries, this paper examines whether the implementation of readmission agreements (key tools in this context) hampers access to international protection for asylum seekers subjected to a return procedure. Given that competence in the ‘Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice’ remains shared, the EU and Member States continue to pursue their readmission procedures in parallel. This paper focuses on the bilateral arrangements of individual Member States with third countries, which constitute the bulk of the instruments in this field. It concludes that no issue of incompatibility with refugee and human rights law stems from the text of readmission agreements, which are purely administrative tools used to articulate the procedures for a smooth return of irregular migrants and rejected refugees to countries of origin or transit. Nonetheless, instances of informal practices of border control, especially in situations of emergency and mass arrivals, demonstrate how the existence of a readmission agreement may boost the use of swift and accelerated identification and return procedures in dissonance with human rights and refugee law. As readmission agreements do not generally include separate provisions on refugees, the risk of removing asylum seekers, as unauthorized migrants, to allegedly ‘safe third countries’ is evident. The paper hails, therefore, as an added value, the introduction in the body of the agreements of both non-affection clauses and procedural human rights clauses creating extra safeguards for removable refugees. To this end, a number of tentative proposals of draft provisions are put forward as a platform for further discussion among legal scholars and policy-makers.