> European countries have long copied each other’s migration policies without much regard to their workability or effectiveness. The recent spate of agreements to outsource border management illustrates what amounts to a transfer of perverse “best practices”.
> It was left for dead, but now it’s back: Rome and Tirana are planning to resuscitate their migration agreement. The detention centres in Shëngjin and Gjäder, in Albania, were originally intended to house asylum seekers from safe countries while they waited for their cases to be processed in Italy. Now they are set to be used as repatriation centres. This news has a certain irony given that, as Annalisa Camilli points out in Internazionale, “the structures of this type [already] present in Italy are half empty”.
>On 11 April, some forty migrants, transferred from various Italian “repatriation detention centres” (CPRs), arrived at the port of Shëngjin, Albania. There they were transferred to the Gjäder detention centre. For some experts, this outcome was significant. According to Italy’s Association for the Juridical Study of Immigration (ASGI), quoted by Camilli, “the transfer to centres in Albania of irregular migrants already locked up in Italian CPRs constitutes ‘a jump of scale’ in migration policies and opens up new scenarios in the European context”.
> For ASGI, this kind of transfer underlines the variegated legal and administrative treatment reserved for migrants. It “[creates] a profound fracture in the legal order as a whole”, cites Camilli. “If, as is often observed, migration policies are a reflection of the quality of rights, what is reflected today is the image of a democracy in the throes of redefinition.”
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> European countries have long copied each other’s migration policies without much regard to their workability or effectiveness. The recent spate of agreements to outsource border management illustrates what amounts to a transfer of perverse “best practices”.
> It was left for dead, but now it’s back: Rome and Tirana are planning to resuscitate their migration agreement. The detention centres in Shëngjin and Gjäder, in Albania, were originally intended to house asylum seekers from safe countries while they waited for their cases to be processed in Italy. Now they are set to be used as repatriation centres. This news has a certain irony given that, as Annalisa Camilli points out in Internazionale, “the structures of this type [already] present in Italy are half empty”.
>On 11 April, some forty migrants, transferred from various Italian “repatriation detention centres” (CPRs), arrived at the port of Shëngjin, Albania. There they were transferred to the Gjäder detention centre. For some experts, this outcome was significant. According to Italy’s Association for the Juridical Study of Immigration (ASGI), quoted by Camilli, “the transfer to centres in Albania of irregular migrants already locked up in Italian CPRs constitutes ‘a jump of scale’ in migration policies and opens up new scenarios in the European context”.
> For ASGI, this kind of transfer underlines the variegated legal and administrative treatment reserved for migrants. It “[creates] a profound fracture in the legal order as a whole”, cites Camilli. “If, as is often observed, migration policies are a reflection of the quality of rights, what is reflected today is the image of a democracy in the throes of redefinition.”