Italian officials question Meloni’s deal with Albania to house migrants

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced on Tuesday an agreement she had struck with non-European Union Albania to outsource the processing and containment of migrants, in a breakthrough to one of the country’s most defining challenges continent.

“I believe it could become a model for cooperation between EU and non-EU countries in managing migration flows,” Ms Meloni told the Rome-based daily. Il Messaggero. “I think this agreement reflects a bold European spirit.”

But Italian politicians, taken aback by Ms Meloni’s announcement in Rome on Monday, questioned whether the deal – struck earlier this week with the nation across the Adriatic – was legal, ethical, practical or even real.

“Before we comment further, we need to understand what exactly they want to do,” European Commission spokeswoman Anitta Hipper said on Tuesday.

While the details of the deal remain unclear, Italy’s motivation couldn’t be clearer. Over the past year, the country has seen the number of migrants from Tunisia and Libya increase from 88,400 last year to more than 145,700. facts of the Italian Ministry of the Interior. As the European Union struggles to modernize and overhaul its migration system and force its member states to reach consensus, migrants keep coming, and leaders like Ms. Meloni feel the urgency of the issue.

Ms. Meloni — who rose to power in part on anti-migrant vitriol, including threats to impose naval blockades on migrant boats — knows that fear of migrants is a powerful political issue. She has signed deals with Tunisia and renewed deals with Libya, advocated burden-sharing among the European Union’s partners and sought to impose harsh penalties on migrant smugglers, labeling the issue a crime of human trafficking.

She has introduced rules against rescue ships operated by non-governmental organizations, which Italy has accused of colluding with human traffickers, forcing them to drop off migrants at far northern ports.

But this week’s deal – the Italian Interior Ministry said there were no details – was Ms Meloni’s latest attempt to jury-rig a solution to a system that often seems broken and Italy appears to be hardest hit. meet. But Italy is not alone in trying to outsource the problem.

The British government has sought to do so asylum seekers to Rwanda, what it is willing to pay for the assessment of migrant claims, as well as the costs of relocation if the migrants remain in Rwanda. British courts have rejected the proposal as unlawful. But it is a top priority of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and he is appealing.

Greece also receives billions of euros from Brussels to keep migrants at bay and has virtually turned some of its islands into high-security shelters.

The deal Ms. Meloni announced would essentially turn Albania, a source of hundreds of thousands of migrants into Italy since the 1990s, into a Greek island for Italy.

Italy, which has received less money from Europe than Greece and faces fierce domestic opposition to new migrant centers, has paid for years to help Libya patrol its coast to prevent the departure of migrants. That has drawn criticism from critics who say the Italian government is complicit in human rights abuses, including rape, taking place in the camps where migrants are held.

This year, Ms. Meloni’s government passed an immigration package to create more government-run centers and detention facilities to house migrants while they await the results of asylum claims. But Italian regions opposed the construction of detention and repatriation centers on their territory. Some conservative governors did not want the centers in their backyard, while progressives opposed placing migrants in prison conditions.

“Everyone has the fundamental right to seek asylum – regardless of where they come from or how they arrive,” Imogen Sudbery, executive director of the International Rescue Committee in Europe, said in a statement. “This latest decision by Italy is part of a worrying trend that is undermining this right.”

“The offshoring process has numerous shortcomings on moral, legal and practical grounds,” she added.

Prime Minister Edi Rama of Albania, which is a candidate for EU membership, said his country received no money from Italy and had agreed to the deal out of the goodness of his heart.

“When Italy calls, Albania will be there,” he said, speaking fluent Italian and standing next to Ms Meloni at the prime minister’s palace in Rome on Monday evening. He said Albania was forever in Italy’s debt because it took in thousands of Albanians in the 1990s; he said they had “escaped hell and hoped for a better life.”

Under the agreement, Italy will finance the construction of two centers on Albanian territory that will fall under Italian jurisdiction and can house up to 3,000 migrants at a time, Ms. Meloni told reporters. She said Italian officials would take migrants to a center in the Albanian port of Shengjin, identify them and transport them to another center inland, where migrants are expected to stay for about 28 days, although asylum applications typically take months if not years. Children and pregnant women are exempt from Albanian centers.

She added that Albania would provide police officers for security and external surveillance of the two centers. And if Italy rejects the migrants’ asylum claims, Albania will deport them to their home country. Ms Meloni said that if asylum applications were processed quickly, as many as 36,000 migrants could be processed on Albanian territory every year.

But experts said Albania would have to expropriate parts of its territory to place them under Italian jurisdiction. It was not clear how Italy could guarantee the proper functioning of an asylum system in which judges in one country weigh the cases of asylum seekers in another.

Judges usually speak to migrants and hear their appeals. Furthermore, to detain migrants in such centers, an Italian official must justify the decision in writing and another judge must ratify that decision. Experts said it was not clear whether the decision to take migrants to Albania would take place on a ship after it had already reached Italy.

“These are all measures and practices that are good for propaganda, but less so for real political solutions,” said Guido Savio, immigration lawyer at the Italian Association for Legal Studies on Immigration.

“It has a symbolic value,” he added, “but numerically it is like emptying the sea with a bucket.”