Meloni is now sending undocumented immigrants to Albania whom he intends to deport

RomeThe first Italian Navy ship with 16 immigrants on board It arrived at the Albanian port of Shengjin on October 16th of last year.Thus began the application of the so-called Italy-Albania protocol. the agreement signed a year earlier by Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, along with her Albanian counterpart, the socialist Edi Rama, with whom Rome hoped to outsource the management of migration flows. With a budget of over 650 million euros, the plan consisted of sending male migrants without the right to asylum, rescued in the Mediterranean, to the Balkan country, inspired by the proposal of former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, which he unsuccessfully attempted. deport undocumented immigrants from the United Kingdom to Rwanda

Italy built two centers on the grounds of a former NATO military base in Albania, with a capacity for almost 900 people. But a year later, successive legal setbacks in Meloni's controversial migration plan have left the barracks, erected in record time in the Balkan country, practically empty. However, the leader of the Brothers of Italy is not giving up.

Meeting in Rome

"Many have tried to block it, but we are determined to move forward, because this mechanism has the potential to change the entire paradigm in the management of migration flows," Meloni asserted at a press conference with the Albanian Prime Minister, with whom he held a bilateral meeting in Rome this week, during which they signed several agreements on energy and migration. However, the first three times Italy sent people rescued in international waters to Albania, judges refused to validate their detention. They ordered them to be transferred to the peninsula.Relying on a European ruling that states a country cannot be considered safe unless it is safe throughout its territory and for all its people, the Italian government then passed a decree reinforcing the list of safe countries, but the Court of Rome requested a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In August, the European court considered that a member state cannot designate a third country as a "safe" country of origin if, for certain categories of people, it does not meet the criteria for such designation.

The CJEU's decision ended –at least for now– Meloni's migration experiment. "When the new European Union Pact on Migration and Asylum comes into force, the centers in Albania will operate as originally intended," she confidently asserted this week.

Change of strategy

While awaiting the new migration pact to come into force in mid-2026, the Italian government has decided to change its strategy and transform one of the two centers built in Albania, the one in Gjadër, into a facility to send undocumented migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected, before deporting them to their countries of origin. It would be an infrastructure similar to the Immigration Detention and Deportation Centers (CIEs) in Spain, but located outside the territory of the European Union.

"Direct repatriation shifts the focus far beyond the bilateral agreement. Not only are people detained outside the Schengen Area, but they are repatriated from a third country without passing through any territory subject to the full jurisdiction of the EU," denounces the NGO Emergency.

Of the 140 people who passed through these facilities between April and August, only 37 were ultimately repatriated. Most were transferred back to Italy before receiving their deportation orders. One of them was Hamid Badoui, a 42-year-old Moroccan man, who took his own life. Badoui had been living illegally in Italy for ten years when he was arrested and transferred from one immigration detention center (CIE) to another within Italy, until he arrived at the Albanian center in Gjadër. He reported that his deportation took place with his wrists bound with plastic zip ties, despite him being under administrative detention. In May, with the Rome-Tirana protocol temporarily suspended, he was transferred back to Italy and released. But shortly afterward, he was imprisoned for his involvement in a fight. "I'm not going back to Albania," he told his lawyer a few days before committing suicide in his cell.

"Protests and suicides are the most visible symptoms of a system designed to isolate and punish," denounces Emergency. "The death of Hamid Badoui is a direct consequence of a political system that uses fear and coercion as a tool to manage human mobility."