March 8th 2025
Alice Lucchini
The Launch of Meloni’s Migrant Centres in Albania: Story of a Humanitarian Disaster Disguised as a Historic Reform
“The centres in Albania will work, even if I have to spend every night there from now until the end of the Italian government”, it is with these words that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni talked about the opening of the new migrant detention centres in Albania, in December 2024. According to the government after months of criticisms and setbacks, the centres are now ready and operational. Meloni’s defensive statement comes after the first – blatantly failed – inauguration dating back to October 2024. That is when the first group of 12 migrants was saved by the Italian Navy and brought to the Gjadër centre, only to be back in Italy after a few days, following the decision of the court of Rome not to validate their detention.
The two centres are part of a deal signed in November 2023 by Italy’s prime minister and her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama. The circumstances in which this agreement was developed suggest that it constitutes a purely political act, reflecting Meloni’s interest in pushing forward her anti-immigrant propaganda, and Rama’s efforts towards Albania’s accession to the EU. The deal is the first of its kind, planning the outsourcing of asylum processes outside of the national territory, in a third country. With a total expenditure of around 670 million euros, the two centres are being fully run by Italy and therefore fall under Italian jurisdiction. Only external security will be managed by Albanian guards. The first centre is located in Shëngjin, and the second one is near a former military airport in Gjadër. The plan is to bring the migrants who are rescued at sea by the Italian military ships to Albania. The centres are built to host up to 3,000 migrants at any time, ideally processing a total of 36,000 transfers per year. In these facilities, asylum requests from migrants will be examined on Albanian soil but under Italian and European jurisdiction, and people awaiting expulsion and repatriation will be held, with an extraterritorial application of administrative detention. Meloni stated that officials plan to process asylum requests within 28 days, thus speeding up the currently lengthy bureaucratic procedure.
NGOs, human rights lawyers and opposition parties have long expressed criticism and concerns about the agreement, which they consider to be in conflict with international law and disrespectful of the human rights of migrants. Despite critical opinions, Meloni has always been a strong advocate of her project, especially underlining its innovative aspect as a powerful tool to manage migration towards Europe. “The most useful element of this project is that it can represent an extraordinary tool of deterrence for illegal migrants destined to reach Europe,” Meloni said in June¹. From a critical point of view, this initiative aligns with the increasing externalisation of migration, that is the European tendency of exporting measures to control migration waves to third countries. This goes hand in hand with the securitisation discourse put into practice by parties of the so-called populist right, of which Fratelli D’Italia, Meloni’s party, is the prime example in Italy. Since the beginning of Meloni’s government in 2022, migration has been an issue at the centre of debates and has been portrayed as a question of security, with the constant emphasis on migrants as symbols of an imminent threat to the local population and a propagandistic crusade against illegal migration.
The project in Albania is therefore an exemplary case of the policies that Meloni’s right has always wanted to implement, always to the detriment of people on the move and their rights.
This has been pointed out by multiple organisations, with Amnesty International calling on the Italian government to “uphold its international law obligations on non-refoulement, to guarantee asylum and calls on the European Commission to ensure that member states do not breach the asylum acquis.” In their official statement, they publicly claim that the deal could be used to circumvent national, international and EU law, having devastating consequences for people on the move. The vast majority of asylum requests are expected to be rejected, because applicants move from countries which, based on Italy’s classification, are considered safe. Consequently, most requests will be turned down and people will be detained and eventually repatriated. Moreover, concerns have been expressed about the evaluation of vulnerable situations, with many experts asking themselves which criteria the government will be able to select the people who will have to be taken to Shëngjin or Gjadër. Both the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, raised worries about the respect of migrants’ rights, especially in terms of identification of vulnerable people, adequacy of asylum procedures and freedom from arbitrary detention.
In addition to the criticism of the initiative in particular, the project is part of a European context of increasing restrictions and violent anti-immigration measures. The tightening of regulations to the detriment of migrants is yet another symptom of a shift towards right-wing security policies in Italy, but also in other countries such as Germany, Bulgaria and Austria. Following the triumph of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) last September, the new coalition government in Austria was recently formed with the declared intent of imposing stricter rules in the field of immigration and implementing increasingly severe punishments against any kind of extremism. This has already been made manifest with the recent news of the Austrian government’s decision to immediately suspend family reunifications for asylum seekers, invoking the European Union’s emergency provisions relating to national security.
As the debate continues to spark criticism, even the last attempt of moving a group of 43 migrants to the two centres in January 2025 blatantly failed. Following the evaluation by the Court of Appeal of Rome, which referred the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union, all the migrants have been brought back to Italy.
Having ultimately realised that her plan will not work, Meloni has been desperately attempting to circumvent legal courts, exposing the government to further breaches of rules of European law. Meloni’s efforts in promoting this project and stressing its legitimacy within the international community can be considered a stubborn attempt to react to criticism coming from all parts and to justify the large expenditure that this new deal is causing. Putting aside humanitarian concerns of any kind, Meloni has carried out a strongly security-based discourse, which has always characterised the policies of her party. This was done without making a secret of the purely political intentions and interests behind the agreement, in an attempt to curry favour with the European community and gain respect and trust at the international level. As always, the category of people most affected is that of migrants, who once again pay the price for the policies of securitisation and the physical and bureaucratic obstacles of that much-vaunted but increasingly hostile ‘fortress Europe’.