Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing PM, has achieved “what the Tories failed so fatally to do with their doomed Rwanda scheme“, said Nicholas Farrell in The Spectator. She has made Italy the first European nation to process asylum applicants offshore.
Her scheme began operations last week, when 16 asylum seekers were ferried across the Adriatic to Albania and taken to the purpose-built facility in the village of Gjadër. The scheme is restricted to healthy male migrants who’ve been intercepted travelling across the Mediterranean in small boats, and who come from any of 19 countries designated safe by Italy. Once in Gjadër, the intention is to process their claims within 28 days. The lucky few granted asylum will then be allowed to go to Italy; the “vast majority will be deported to their countries of origin”. It is a potentially “game-changing” approach to illegal migration.
The five-year deal between Rome and Tirana is unlike anything we’ve seen before in Europe, said Libération (Paris). Struck in November 2023, it will see Italy pay €160m a year to Albania; in return, Rome hopes that 3,000 asylum seekers a month will be processed there. Migrants will arrive in the port of Shëngjin, said Shekulli (Tirana), where they will undergo a health check, be given clean clothes (“blue or black sweatshirts and overalls”). They’ll then be taken by bus to Gjadër, and its 70,000sq m facility enclosed by six-metre-high metal fences, which is divided into three sectors. The first is made up of prefabricated accommodation units split into four-bed rooms: there is no canteen; food must be “prepared and consumed in the common areas”. The second is a secure zone reserved for those who have been “refused asylum and are waiting to be repatriated”; the third is a small jail for those who commit offences at the facility.
Anyone who sees photos of the Gjadër facility “can only be horrified”, said Marc Beise in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich): it looks like a high-security prison. The worst of it is that it won’t even solve the problem it sets out to. The “unwilling pioneers” of this nasty social experiment had been carefully selected: they came from Egypt and Bangladesh, the hope being that, as these are relatively stable countries, the 16 migrants wouldn’t be able to escape deportation by claiming asylum. But a ruling by the European Court of Justice two weeks ago has driven a coach and horses through that hope, said Eduard Halimi in Gazeta Panorama (Tirana). In a major blow to Meloni, the court ruled that no non-EU country can be deemed “safe” by a member state unless its entire territory is free of danger for everyone. And that has, for now, put the kibosh on Meloni’s scheme, said Elena Giordano on Politico (Brussels). This week, an immigration court in Rome ruled that the 16 migrants cannot be detained: they will almost certainly have to be sent back to Italy.
Meloni’s government has passed a new law to save the scheme, said The Economist. Whatever the outcome, with so many EU countries – from the Netherlands to Poland – turning sour on asylum, it is being closely scrutinised across the bloc. How different all this is from the way Europe envisaged its asylum system ten years ago, said Peter Rásonyi in Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Back then, Brussels was guided by the worthy ideal, informed by “the humanitarian principles of international law”, that Europe “should be open to all newcomers who want to apply for asylum”. But, “overwhelmed by the reality of uncontrolled immigration”, nations such as Germany and Sweden are now desperately searching for ways to stem it.
And for many, the Italian model fits the bill, said Eric Bonse in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin): even the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has mooted “deportation centres” abroad as a possibility. Reception camps outside the EU; new deals with autocratically governed countries of origin; even deportations to Syria: “suddenly everything seems possible”. Yes, the Italian model will face legal challenges. Yes, it might not even work. But in the current climate, it looks likely to catch on.