The European Council which is being held this Thursday in Brussels has immigration as its central theme. While there are two wars at the gates of Europe whose medium and long-term consequences are unknown, the priority on the table of European leaders is to know how to give a new turn of the screw to the migration policy of the EU, without even waiting for the new Pact on Immigration and Asylum which will come into force in two years and which, the result of a compromise and very long negotiations, is already further tightening access to asylum on the continent.
Significantly, the summit had an unprecedented prologue with an informal meeting called by the president of the Italian government, Giorgia Meloni, with the prime ministers of the far-right government of the Netherlands and the Danish social democrat Mette Frederiksen, at which, together with other countries – Austria, Cipro, Greece, Malta, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, was also present. The goal? Explore “innovative solutions” to de facto further strengthen EU border management and migration policies with security in mind.
And among these “innovative solutions”, the model is the experiment that Italy, after months of delays and millions of euros of contracts without a call for tenders, has just started with the detention centers for migrants in Albania . An experiment that begins to produce water as soon as it begins. Hours after the first 16 migrants arrived in Albania aboard an Italian navy ship, it was discovered that four were being sent back to Italy, two because they were minors and two others because They were considered “vulnerable”.
In other words, the first thing that failed is precisely what lawyers and NGOs have been denouncing for weeks: the express selection carried out after the rescues of migrants in the Mediterranean. According to the operational protocol of the agreement between Italy and Albania, only adult men from countries considered safe should arrive in the centers built on Albanian soil (a concept which in itself is a “black hole”), and even more so after a recent decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union, according to which a country can only be considered safe if it is truly safe in its entirety). The fact is that in this express selection there is no guarantee – as experts and activists have denounced and as reality has confirmed – that there are no minors among those selected.
In the end, the first trip to Albania ended up having an even more exorbitant cost of 18,000 euros estimated for each of the 16 people transferred, whose retention in these enclaves of Italian jurisdiction on Albanian soil will be at least nine times more expensive than their reception in Italy, as Matteo Villa, researcher at the Institute for International Policy Studies (ISPI, by its Italian acronym), has been explaining for days.
Villa also pointed out that in addition to the costs, the plan also fails to achieve the main objective declared by the Meloni government: to have a “deterrent effect”. The 16 migrants initially transferred to Albania represent less than 1 percent of those arriving on Italian shores in recent days.
Von der Leyen’s support
But we had to have a photo before the European Council. And there you have it. And even if the photo is very bad, the model, in an increasingly distraught Europe, remains valid. And not only that. In the race to see who gives the most, the Netherlands has joined us. The government – a four-party coalition, led by Geert Wilders’ far-right party – is exploring the possibility of taking asylum seekers even further: to Uganda.
All blessed by Von der Leyen who opened herself to the exploration of these “innovative solutions”, which, as Irene Castro said this Wednesday, “demonstrated a particularly chameleonic attitude which made her led to now impose the agenda of the right in the face of measured commitments.” This is the same Von der Leyen who, when Greece suspended the right to asylum at the border with Turkey in March 2020, thanked Athens for being a “shield”.
The fact that Italy’s grotesque experience in Albania has become a model for other European capitals might seem like a bad and expensive joke (in Italy’s case, at least a billion in five years, according to estimates). But no. It is one more step towards the erosion of the right to asylum and so-called European values, on the skin of people whose fault is being born with a bad passport.
