King's College London

Fifteen European governments (including 12 EU members) have called for the EU to change how it manages migration and asylum seekers. They want, primarily, to speed up the process by which irregular migrants can be returned to the countries they came from.

Citing Italy’s new arrangement with Albania as a model, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has called for an exploration of “return hubs” in countries outside of the EU.

Under this agreement, Italy is operating two processing centres in Albania to decide the cases of asylum seekers. Those awarded asylum will be allowed to enter Italy. Those rejected will be deported back to their country of origin.

Arrangements of this kind are known as the “externalisation” of migration – when a country’s migration processes take place outside of its borders. This approach is gaining traction throughout Europe, but it is controversial.

Many reputable experts and organisations working on human rights, migration and asylum protection argue that the Italy-Albania agreement is flawed, dehumanising and does not comply with human rights standards.

The deal has already faced a significant legal hurdle, with a court ruling that the first group of migrants sent to Albania must be returned to Italy. The Italian government has since passed a law to allow the government to amend the procedures, removing the legal barriers to this arrangement.

Externalisation and EU membership

What is particularly interesting about the Albania-Italy case is how migration collaboration appears to be intertwined with Albania’s EU membership talks. Albania has been an official candidate for accession to the bloc since 2014.

Accession talks had progressed slowly. Denmark, France and the Netherlands have also blocked Albania from starting EU membership negotiations since 2019 due to their concerns about Albania’s efforts to fight organised crime and corruption.

Another issue for Albania was that its bid was, for a long period, linked with North Macedonia’s for various procedural and political reasons. The two countries’ bids were decoupled in October.

This, alongside the agreement with Italy on offshore migrants and geopolitical developments since Russia’s war in Ukraine, effectively unlocked Albania’s accession talks. At the time the deal was signed, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni said she would do everything in her power to support Albania’s accession bid.

Talks began in October, the very same week that the first asylum seekers from Italy were sent to Albania.

The EU Commission, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán (whose country currently holds the EU Council presidency), and Meloni now all say that Albania is at the front of the queue of countries seeking to join the EU. In their view, Albania should be rewarded for agreeing to set up migration centres, because it is doing more to control the flow of migrants than some EU countries.

The newly reformed EU membership criteria in 2020 require EU candidates to show full alignment with the EU’s security, defence and foreign policies before joining the EU. This includes working closely with Frontex, the EU border force agency, to manage migration flows.

Albania became the first EU candidate to sign a Frontex agreement in 2019, giving legal authority for border monitoring and fighting cross-border crimes. The deal with Frontex laid the groundwork for the arrangement with Italy.

Frontex became operational in all EU candidate nations in 2022, after the EU changed laws to make this possible. This change was made because the western Balkans route was the main route for migrants to enter Europe in 2015, when the influx of migrants was at its height.

The price of EU membership?

Without a doubt, the offshoring of migration camps has changed the minds of EU members who opposed starting membership negotiations with Albania.

European leaders are now also reportedly considering plans to set up more deportation camps in countries that are hoping to join the EU, increasingly presenting it as a security issue.

This includes Denmark, which already passed a law to allow the setting up of offshore camps outside the EU. Austria has asked for the western Balkans to play a bigger role in managing the influx of migration into Europe. Germany is moving ahead with investigations into whether it, too, can outsource its asylum system.

Germany chancellor Olaf Scholz has indicated that he was softening on the idea of deals like the one between Italy and Albania at a summit in Berlin between some of the EU and western Balkans leaders in October.

In late October, Von der Leyen visited all the western Balkans countries to discuss these proposals.

The EU should neither champion the Italy and Albania deal as a model, nor justify offshore migrant camps as part of its EU membership criteria. These legally questionable developments could come at the expense of disguising issues about the rule of law, human rights standards and corruption and organised crime – all of which are important prerequisites to EU membership.