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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni widely celebrated her third anniversary in office on October 22.
Another anniversary, however, she spent in silence: on the morning of October 16, 2024, the first 16 immigrants arrived at the Italian reception center in the port city of Shëngjin in northern Albania, and from there, after the first medical and psychological check-up, they were transferred to the deportation camp in Gjadra, a few kilometers away.
Shortly after signing the declaration of intent with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in November 2023, Meloni had praised this type of camp as an important tool in the fight against illegal immigration. But the construction itself was delayed: the facilities were completed almost five months later than expected. Then, before the Italian and European courts, the government in Rome suffered several defeats.
All migrants by boat, who were transferred by the Italian Coast Guard directly from the Mediterranean to the camps in Albania, according to the court order, had to be transported back to Italy. They are now following the regular asylum procedure, which was foreseen to be shortened by transferring them directly from the international waters of the Mediterranean to a non-EU country like Albania. Only about sixty migrants by boat passed through the camps of Gjadri and Shëngjin until February 2025, which are designed for a capacity of 3600 people per year.
At the end of March, the government in Rome decided to use the camp in Gjadra as a deportation center for migrants whose asylum applications in Italy had been rejected and who were in detention for criminal offenses. But even this use did not bring progress in the “Albania model”. This was confirmed by three deputies from the left-wing opposition parties, who used the first anniversary of the opening of the camps for an inspection visit to Albania. The reception center in the port of Shëngjin was completely empty. In Gjadra, the parliamentarians found 25 people. The closed return center in the camp of a former military airport, which since March has had a capacity for 144 migrants, was almost unused.
According to the Italian Interior Ministry, since September, about ten people have been transported every two weeks from Italy to Gjadra. Most of them, before returning to their countries, are sent back to Italy. In early May alone, five Egyptians were flown directly from Albania to Cairo.
Social Democrat MP Matteo Orfini criticized in Gjadra that the detention of rejected asylum seekers and their return from Albania violates the jurisprudence of the European Court. Also, placing some asylum seekers in the Albanian camp costs a lot of money. The government has estimated the cost of operating the camps at 650 million euros over five years, while the opposition predicts that the costs could reach up to one billion euros.
If we calculate that during the first year of operation, about 200 immigrants passed through the centers and the operating costs according to government data are 130 million euros per year, then the result is a cost of 650,000 euros per person, said Orfini: "This failure is paid for with taxpayers' money." / From Frankfurter Allgemeine
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