The Italian agreement with Albania and the dehumanization of migrants in Europe

Council of Europe:'The memorandum of understanding signed by Italy and Albania raises several human rights concerns and adds to a worrying European trend towards the outsourcing of asylum responsibilities'

Update November 17, 2023: Through a note from the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based humanitarian body, the Council of Europe expressed serious doubts on the protocol signed between Italy and Albania for the management of migrants.“The MoU raises a number of important questions about the impact its implementation would have on the human rights of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants,” the statement reads."These concern, among others, timely disembarkation, the impact on search and rescue operations, the fairness of asylum procedures, the identification of vulnerable persons, the possibility of automatic detention without adequate judicial review, conditions of detention, access to legal aid and effective remedies".

"The agreement - continues Mijatovic - creates an ad hoc extraterritorial asylum regime characterized by many legal ambiguities" which could compromise "the fundamental guarantees for human rights and responsibility for violations, resulting in differentiated treatment between those whose applications for asylum will be examined in Albania and those for whom this will take place in Italy".

Mijatovic also underlined how the agreement between Italy and Albania is part of the increasingly consolidated trend in Europe to outsource reception as a potential "quick solution" to the complex challenges posed by the arrival of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.“However, externalization measures significantly increase the risk of exposing refugees, asylum seekers and migrants to human rights violations,” concludes Mijatovic.The risk is that of triggering a domino effect that "could undermine the European and global system of international protection".

On November 6, the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with his Albanian counterpart Edi Rama with the aim of transferring migrants rescued by Italian ships to Albania.Two days later the Albanian government has published the full text of the protocol which will be in force for 5 years:Italy will pay 16.5 million euros to Albania the first year for the detention of migrants.The idea is to outline a new "management of migrants", as anticipated by Meloni, using the port of Shengjin and the Gjader area to create, at Italy's expense and under its jurisdiction, two structures to manage entry, temporary reception, the processing of applications for asylum and possible repatriation.The agreement will come into force next spring and will not concern migrants rescued by non-governmental organizations active at sea, but only those intercepted by the Navy and the Financial Police.Meloni specified that this management will not concern pregnant women, minors and vulnerable subjects.Staff, police forces and Italian asylum commissions will operate in the two centers that will be built in Albania.Migrants will stay for "the time necessary for the procedures".Jurisdiction will be Italian, while Albania will collaborate with its police forces for the security and external surveillance of the facilities.

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The handshake between Meloni and Rama represents, according to the Prime Minister, the strengthening of the strategic partnership between Italy and Albania and has the aim of "countering human trafficking, preventing irregular migratory flows and welcoming only those who have the right to international protection".In ainterview al Messenger, Meloni claims that this agreement can become "a model of collaboration between EU and non-EU countries on the management of migratory flows".Not only that:for the Prime Minister it is an "agreement with a great European spirit, with which Albania confirms itself not only as a nation friendly to Italy but also a nation friendly to the EU.

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The senator of the Brothers of Italy, Alberto Balboni, guest at the transmission Tagadà of 7 November, confirmed what was anticipated by the Minister of the Interior Piantedosi according to which a reception center and a repatriation center will be built (with an accelerated procedure), with all due respect to the legislation which requires the individual examination of all asylum applications.Balboni said that Italy has decided in this direction because "nobody wants immigrants anymore.We did not inform Parliament because in the meantime we wanted to check the availability of a partner for Italy."

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The Government, he added, intends to do everything with extreme transparency, entrusting the management of the centers to the Red Cross and also consulting the UN High Commissioner to guarantee respect for the rights of migrants.According to Balboni, the relocation of migrants to Albania will have an "important deterrent effect;if a migrant knows that he is being disembarked in Albania, perhaps he doesn't leave."Indeed, he added that with this agreement Fratelli d'Italia wants to "enshrine a right, that is, that one cannot arrive in Italy illegally".Then trying to defend the Government's work on the management of migratory flows, Balboni underlined the amnesties, which allowed 450 thousand foreigners to regularise.But the Fratelli d'Italia senator is perhaps not aware that the amnesties do not concern landings, but are procedures that have the aim of regularizing foreign citizens who have been working illegally in Italy for years.The regularization of foreign citizens is subordinated to the will of the employers, creating a relationship of dependence that has nothing to do with rights, not to mention the lengthy bureaucratic procedures.

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A legal sieve 

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After the announcement of the agreement, although still unclear and without concrete guidelines, the opposition immediately criticized Meloni because the pact signed with Albania seems to be in open violation of the rules of international law and European law.It is clear that the agreement between Tirana and Rome has little to do with the desire to collaborate between countries, just as it is equally clear that the relocation of migrants, effectively treated as goods, is the result of a security and deterrence approach migrations.Not only that, at the basis of the agreement is the naive belief that migrants will decide not to leave due to the more stringent measures on the European continent, a fact contradicted by the fact that in 2023 the departures are double.There remains a controversial issue regarding the personal freedom of migrants:What is the legal justification for this de facto detention, among other things in a non-European country?

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It seems possible to conclude that this is yet another short-sighted maneuver by the Government on migrants. Like the memorandum with Tunisia, with Kais Saied returning the money, supported by a strongly anti-European sentiment that has very little to do with collaboration between states.And again, the proposal to build repatriation centers in each region of the national territory, with the immediate protests of right-wing governors.

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Meloni's proposal is also unconvincing due to serious logistical gaps, such as underlined by the jurist Vitalba Azzollini who defined the agreement as a legal sieve.The territorial commissions and competent judges will be Italian and will probably have to examine the requests remotely.The executive was not able to specify through which platforms and in what way all this will take place, also considering the extreme slowness of the electronic civil trial, introduced just a few months ago for Justices of the Peace and already in enormous difficulty.Then there is the question of repatriations, the real objective of this government, at least in words.The Albanian Prime Minister has already clarified that Tirana will not be responsible for the repatriations and that migrants deemed unsuitable for international protection will be sent back to Italy, where the repatriation system, as we have seen, does not work.Again, one wonders what to do with family units if these centers were designed only for adult male migrants. What will be done in the case of minors accompanied by adult men? 

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An opportunity for Albania

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Despite Meloni's enthusiasm, the Government's decision was not well received by either Parliament or the Commission, because they were not informed of the agreement, while the PD presented a request for a parliamentary question on the matter.The handshake with the Albanian prime minister, upon closer inspection, seems more like a precious opportunity for Tirana, which needs to have a country at its side in the delicate process of joining the European Union.

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The community bodies want to have more information on Meloni's decision to send the asylum seekers to Albania after an agreement practically without warning.Europe will have to evaluate the legitimacy of the agreement, i.e. compliance with international and community law, which, it is worth remembering, prevail over domestic law.For the International Rescue Committee, Rome's agreement with Tirana represents a "further blow" for solidarity on the part of the EU.The Commission has pointed out that this approach corresponds to a dehumanisation of migrants.Imogen Sudbery, IRC Director for Europe Advocacy he stated that “everyone has the fundamental right to ask for asylum, regardless of where they come from or how they arrive.”

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Giulia Spagna, country director for Italy at the Danish Refugee Council, has stated that the latest agreement between Italy and Albania seems to fit the trend of externalizing Europe's borders to a third country.The ideas underlying the pact seem to indicate Meloni's alignment with the "No” of nationalist EU countries to the update of the Dublin Treaty and the need for joint measures to manage migration and asylum in the EU.Italy she has already been convicted for the rejection of asylum seekers and recently the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has prevented implementation of the agreement with Rwanda, which predicted to pay the Rwandan government a sum in exchange for the detention of the migrants.Even in the case of an agreement with Albania, an appeal and a sentence from an Italian court will be enough to block the relocation plan.

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Europe's nationalist tendency in rejecting migrants 

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Italy joins the list of countries moving towards these policies of rejection and control and the agreement with Tirana is part of a worrying trend for the protection of the right to asylum, effectively banning migrants from accessing the continent European.According to Sudbery, this is not the first time a member state has looked at this possibility, but “there are key reasons why these past proposals have not moved forward:the offshoring process presents various critical issues on a moral, legal and practical level".The proposed agreement between Italy and Albania further undermines a possible shared European integration plan:if everyone goes in the direction of internal security, homogeneous reception practices cannot exist.Sudbery added that “it is essential that EU states support and strengthen the right to request asylum on their territory, making the procedure subject to respect for the fundamental rights of people on the move”.

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The United Kingdom it pioneered this trend of externalization of borders;initially he had proposed an agreement with Rwanda, declared illegitimate by the European Court of Human Rights and the English Court of Appeal, and then foreseeing the forced transfer of illegal immigrants in the South Atlantic Ocean, 1,600 km from the coast of Africa and 2,300 from that of Brazil, under British rule.Rishi Sunak finally chose to house the migrants on board a giant barge moored off the south of the island, where a detention facility has been built.Even theAustria decided to relocate the migrants to a third country, making an agreement with the United Kingdom, which has not yet left due to international conventions.

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Even the German leader Scholz made a series of legislative changes aimed at allowing faster deportations of asylum seekers, punishing human traffickers and allowing asylum seekers easier access to jobs, which was considered an urgent matter.Border controls with Poland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Austria have also been intensified.Among the agreed measures there is also a decrease in the economic resources made available to foreign citizens.Scholz said his government was still considering whether asylum procedures outside the EU were possible, but was not yet ready to decide on what has long been a "highly controversial issue."The latest news in this direction comes from Sweden, which proposed a rule by which it could become mandatory to report the illegal stay of immigrants in Sweden, as well as to strengthen internal controls on immigration through random checks and DNA tests.

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The problems with this approach have been highlighted several times:they put at risk the implementation of the rules on asylum and human rights, they fail to guarantee dignified conditions and treatment to the people hosted in the centres, they do not specify what happens to those who must be repatriated, in the absence of a bilateral agreement with the countries of origin.Giulia Spagna also has underlined that “the legal feasibility of such agreements is always very weak”.

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The result, he said, “is that once again taxpayers' time and money will be wasted on incomplete solutions, perhaps useful for short-lived propaganda but destined to fail, instead of focusing on a pragmatic European plan for the redistribution of arrivals” .

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Preview image:Palazzo Chigi video frame via YouTube

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