Meloni promises to continue plan for migrant camps in Albania

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has vowed to relaunch a plan to detain migrants in Albania, a flagship project of her conservative government that has been blocked by the courts, Reuters reports.

Italy and Albania signed a protocol in 2023 that would transfer migrants caught at sea to Albania, where their asylum claims would be considered, the first such agreement between a European Union (EU) country and a state outside the bloc.

However, the plan was almost immediately halted after Italian courts ordered the migrants to be returned to Italy, citing problems with EU laws.

The EU's top court also ruled against the Italian government in August, dealing another blow to the plan. However, Meloni is confident that the camps in Albania will be operational by mid-2026, when new EU rules on migration and asylum are due to come into force.

"Many have tried to slow it down or block it, but we are determined to move forward, because this mechanism has the capacity to change the entire (migration) system," Meloni said at a press conference in Rome with Albanian counterpart Edi Rama.

Albanian camps mostly empty

Italy planned for the camps in Albania to process and largely reject the claims of around 36.000 male asylum seekers a year, but they have been largely empty since opening in October 2024.

Since the migrants who would be sent to Albania come from the government's list of "safe countries", it was expected that most of their asylum applications would be rejected.

Meloni believes that the entire project should act as a deterrent to migrants trying to enter Italy via the Mediterranean.

After judges prevented the camps from being used as originally planned, Italy turned them into repatriation centers for rejected asylum seekers. Media reports say they house only a few hundred people.

One analyst warned that legal obstacles could remain even after the new EU rules come into force, given the "exceptional" legal status of Italian detention facilities located on the territory of a foreign state.

"I expect that even if they become fully operational, complaints will still be filed," Luka Barana, a migration expert at the Institute for International Affairs, told Reuters.