Italy’s Latest Expensive Embarrassment, Daily Brief April 2, 2025

They built a big detention camp overseas. It cost a fortune. They now can’t use it for its original purpose, so they’re desperately trying to find other ways to use it.

Welcome to the upside-down world of the Italian government’s embarrassing – and abusive – approach to immigration.

This chapter of the story begins with an agreement between Italy and Albania in 2023. Under the deal, a large detention facility was built in Gjadër, Albania, to hold adult males intercepted at sea by Italian ships and process their asylum claims.

Men from countries Italy considers “safe” would be sent directly to Albania, never touching Italian soil. There they would supposedly be subjected to a fast-track asylum procedure on the presumption they wouldn’t need protection.

However, Italy’s courts said no.

The courts rightly pointed out that the countries the Italian government lists as “safe countries of origin” may not actually be safe for everyone.

In other words, a country might be safe in one location but not in another or safe for some people and not for others. There are all sorts of things to consider, and each asylum case has to be looked at individually.

Italy’s courts declared it would be unlawful to detain people under the assumption the country they come from is safe for everyone.

So, Italy’s detention facility in Gjadër, Albania – part of a scheme that has cost an estimated 800 million euros – now lies completely empty.

Obviously, such a costly mistake is embarrassing for the Italian government. So, they’ve come up with another proposal for the facility.

They now want to use it to hold undocumented migrants whose claims have been rejected. They want to take people who are currently in Italy and have been ordered detained pending deportation, and send them to detention in Albania.

It’s a bizarre move, to say the least.

Italy already has ten such detention centers in Italy. There, they hold people for up to 18 months while the government tries to deport them.

These facilities in Italy are grim. Recent expert reports describe them as “black holes” and denounce the whole system as costly and inhumane.

It’s hard to see how an eleventh center – this one in Albania – won’t simply replicate these abuses. It might even be worse, given it’s even further from the public eye.

What’s more, the detention centers in Italy generally don’t even “work” in the way the government wants. Only ten percent of people under deportation orders are actually deported.

Their being in Albania isn’t going to change that. There’s no benefit for anyone here. It’s just internationalizing abuse.

Like so many governments across the European Union, the Italian government has spent years tying itself in knots on asylum. By trying to appear “tough,” they’ve only abused people while embarrassing themselves and wasting huge amounts of taxpayers’ money.

Perhaps someday, these governments will come to their senses and invest in managing migration in a humane and rational way. At the moment, however, they seem to be trying just about everything but.