2nd anniversary of the Italy–Albania migration agreement : let’s dismantle it !

On 1st and 2nd November, a transnational mobilisation led by Network Against Migrant Detention [1] will take place in Albania to call for the complete dismantling of the migration agreement signed two years earlier between Italy and Albania. In support of this mobilisation, the associations and collectives signing this statement warn about the violence and dangerousness of this agreement, fuelled by racist, colonial and fascist institutional logics. Everywhere, let’s mobilise for its dismantling!

What is it about?

This agreement was signed in November 2023 to allow Italy to externalise the processing of asylum applications from foreign nationals intercepted at sea by the Italian authorities. Very concretely, these people are not to set foot in Italy: they are instead forcibly transferred — with no, or almost no, medical assessment — to one of the two camps subsequently built on Albanian soil: in Shëngjin and in Gjader. These camps are veritable prisons, ringed with high fences and barbed wire, and are used to sort people and then detain, repress and deport the great majority of them. [2]

A candidate country for EU accession since 2014, Albania has therefore ceded two territories to Italy for the construction and administration of these camps, placed under Italian police jurisdiction and management. Let us recall that Mussolini’s Italy invaded Albania in 1939! The fascist and colonial overtones of such an agreement are beyond doubt.

These are the very same overtones that have enabled the EU and its member states, for 25 years, to entrench this border externalisation logic by signing multilateral and bilateral agreements (regularly with their former colonies) in exchange for trade advantages benefiting European capitalist companies, shifts in foreign policy, or “development aid” itself determined according to European interests.

Nothing about this Italy–Albania agreement and other externalisation agreements is acceptable! And the judgment of 1st August 2025 [3] by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is hardly reassuring. It held that the Italian government had acted with excessive zeal in designating certain countries of origin as “safe” without offering any possible remedy against this decision, even though those countries cannot be considered “safe” for certain people. That designation was a legal condition to render transfers to the two Italian camps in Albania compatible with EU asylum law.

The entry into force of the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum in June 2026 could remove this brake on Rome’s asylum strategy. More broadly, this Pact is a new instrument to cement the externalisation of borders and to expand the detention, repression and deportation of foreign nationals, disregarding their lives, rights and dignity. It even invents a legal fiction to filter people at the border, without considering them to have entered EU territory, thereby evading respect for the right to asylum.

We demand the abolition of the Italy–Albania agreement and the destruction of the Shëngjin and Gjader camps!

From Nantes [4] to Tirana [5], let’s multiply mobilisations against this agreement!

Freedom of movement and settlement for all, and the closure of all prisons for foreign nationals!