He European Council held this Thursday In Brussels, immigration is its central theme. While there are two wars at the gates of Europe of which the consequences in the medium and long term are unknown, the priority of European leaders is how to give another twist to the EU’s migration policy, without even waiting for The new Immigration and Asylum Pact comes into force in two years. A pact that – the result of a compromise and very long negotiations – already tightens access to asylum on the continent.
Significantly, the summit had an unprecedented prologue with an informal meeting called by the President of the Government of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and the prime ministers of the Netherlands and Denmark, and to which, together with other countries – Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, also attended. The goal? Explore “innovative solutions” to de facto change EU border management and migration policies even more in a security sense.
Among those “innovative solutions”, the model is the experiment that Italy, after months of delays and millions of euros in no-bid contracts, has just started with detention centers for migrants in Albania. An experiment that begins to make 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 had to be transferred to Italy, two because they were minors and two others because they were considered “vulnerable.”
That is to say, the first thing that has failed is exactly what jurists and NGOs have been denouncing for weeks: the express selection made 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 at the centers built on Albanian soil (a concept that in itself is a ‘black hole’ and even more so after a recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, according to which a country can be considered safe only if it really is safe in its entirety). The fact is that in this express selection There is no guarantee—as experts and activists denounced and as reality has confirmed—that among those selected there will not be, for example, minors.
In the end, the first trip to Albania has ended up having an even more exorbitant cost of the 18,000 euros that were estimated for each of the 16 people transferred, whose maintenance there, in these enclaves of Italian jurisdiction on Albanian soil, will be at least nine times more expensive than his reception in Italy, as he has been explaining for days Matteo Villa, researcher at the Institute for International Policy Studies (ISPI, for its acronym in Italian).
Villa also stressed that, apart from the costs, the plan also fails in the main objective declared by the Meloni Government: to have a “deterrent effect.” The 16 migrants initially transferred to Albania are less than one percent of those who have arrived on Italian shores in recent days.
Von der Leyen’s support
But it was necessary to have a photo before the European Council. And there it is. Although the photo is very bad, the model, in an increasingly clueless Europe, is still valid. And not only this. In the race to see who gives more, the Netherlands has joined. The Government – a coalition of four parties, led by the far-right party of Geert Wilders – is studying the possibility of taking asylum seekers even further: to Uganda.
All blessed by Von der Leyen who has opened herself to exploring these “innovative solutions” and who, As Irene Castro said this Wednesday, “He has shown a particularly chameleonic attitude that has led him to now impose the right-wing agenda in the face of the measured commitments on the matter that he made before the European Parliament, where he gained the support of his party, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens.” It is the same Von der Leyen who, when Greece suspended the right to asylum on the border with Turkey in March 2020, thanked Athens for being a “shield.”
The fact that Italy’s grotesque experiment in Albania has become a model for other capitals in Europe might seem like a bad and expensive joke (in the case of Italy at least a billion in five years, according to estimates). . But not. It is one more step towards the erosion of the right to asylum and supposed European values, on the skin of people whose fault is having been born with the wrong passport.
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