In 2023, Italy and Albania – an EU candidate country not currently part of the Union – came to an understanding. For years, the two countries’ coast guards had plucked people from the Adriatic sea. They would become international protection applicants who’d made the potentially lethal crossing, hoping to be granted asylum on Italian soil. The question of who ought to take responsibility for these desperate individuals had long raised tensions between the two countries. Now things were going to be different. Prime Ministers Edi Rama and Giorgia Meloni held up their signed agreements and shook hands, smiling as cameras flashed.
In the original agreement, detention centres would be built on Albanian soil: in those centres, refugees rescued from the sea attempting a water crossing into Italy would be detained – even those rescued in Italian search-and-rescue jurisdictions. Although they would be Albania’s responsibility in a material sense, the detention centres would fall under Italian jurisdiction, meaning the legal responsibility for processing the asylum claims would still be Italy’s. This approach isn’t unique: it’s been attempted in various forms across the world and is sometimes called “externalisation”. The Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović called the Memorandum an “ad hoc extra-territorial asylum regime” and part of a “worrying European trend”.
“It plays into the bigger role of what non-EU European countries do for the EU, and how they’re treated,” explained journalist Sara Čurić. Living and working in the Balkans as a political correspondent for a number of years, she saw national governments rife with corruption, “grasping at straws” to access funding, while emigration to the more prosperous West led to a vicious cycle of brain drain. In that context, an EU country “sending their migrants into a lower income country” had always rubbed Čurić the wrong way.
Albania’s GDP in 2024 was valued at a little over 27 million USD; Italian GDP was over 2.3 billion that same year. With that wealth would come – presumably – the resources to set up and administer their own detention centres. Instead, the Italian state budgeted 650 million euros for the transfer of 36,000 detainees to Albania. The Memorandum was criticised for its encroachment on Albanian sovereignty, its general impracticability, and its potential to lead to human rights violations; nonetheless, externalisation continued.
“When Balkan workers come to the EU, there’s a very specific attitude towards them… they’re seen as less,” she said. “Considering that so many Balkan people are leaving for the EU because of money and the living standard, that ties into the whole thing… all the countries here [in the Balkans] see the EU as a grand savior.” Even if Albanian ascendancy into the EU was never explicitly referenced as a benefit of entering the original agreement with Italy, it’s hard to separate policies like this from that wider economic context. The relationship between countries like Albania and Italy, or Greece and North Macedonia, is fundamentally imbalanced; that won’t change for as long as one half of the negotiating parties is part of a very exclusive, and very wealthy, club. “Being part of the EU is a dream for all the countries here,” she said.
Externalisation: A Hard Bargain
From the perspective of the Balkan public, this was piling more weight on an infrastructure already close to buckling under the weight of skyrocketing land crossings. “Using another country’s resources to make European countries’ situation easier never sat quite right with me,” Čurić said.
Although the Albanian premier rejected suggestions that he might broker similar deals with other states – claiming the country had been asked by others – other countries have attempted similar schemes to off-shore responsibility onto states with objectively less resources.
In 2022, Conservative PM Boris Johnson and Rwandan foreign minister Vincent Biruta brokered a deal: asylum seekers whose claims had been rejected would be flown to resettle in Rwanda, regardless of their country of origin. This was swiftly deemed incompatible with international law by the UK’s Supreme Court, since the UK government couldn’t guarantee sufficient safety to the people they sent there. Of course, this was all hypothetical., no scheduled flights taking applicants to Rwanda ever left British soil. The now-scrapped plan led to a grand total of four voluntary resettlements in Rwanda, at a total estimated cost of 240 million pounds to the UK taxpayer. (To make this whole story even more of a resounding failure, the Rwandan government have recently begun proceedings to sue the British government for failing to pay them the resettlement funding they were promised.)
The Rwanda-UK deal reveals the goal of these deportation schemes isn’t necessarily more efficient processing. Given the massive cost-inefficiency of the scheme and the increasing xenophobic sentiment among the British public at the same time the Rwanda-UK deal was first announced in 2022, the whole proposal seems to have been more of a political stunt to appease potential voters than anything else. The gleeful way that conservative politicians announced migrants would be “sent to Rwanda” is perhaps a clue to the real purpose of the scheme, punishing few to deter many.
Human Rights and “Safety”
So how can such actions be justified under international law? Though there’s no real way to force a country to take asylum seekers, membership of the EU connotes that countries will uphold certain democratic and humanitarian standards. Article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union guarantees the right to asylum. In May 2024, the European Parliament issued a Directive requiring member states to “provide an adequate standard of living for applicants for international protection”. The EU Court of Human Rights is a body that decides whether or not member states are doing enough to protect these abstract rights; it would be this court who decided whether Italy was – by holding people in what are essentially prisons in Albania – providing them with an “adequate standard of living”.
However, the key source of tension between European higher courts and member states over the last few years hasn’t been to do with the material treatment of asylum seekers, but on a different topic altogether – a topic that, in 2026, the EU seems determined to iron out for the final time. That’s “safe countries”: the list of other countries across the world that the EU deems safe enough for a refugee to return to or move to. If you come from a safe country of origin, it’s on you to prove that you can’t go back, and it’s very unlikely that your application for asylum will be approved.
For a long time, member states clashed with higher courts about what could count as a “safe country of origin”, allowing them to dismiss a claim for asylum. For instance, in 2025, the European Court of Justice says that Italy could not declare Bangladesh a safe country of origin because certain vulnerable groups aren’t “safe” there.
However, it still looks like a battle that member states have won in the end. The much-heralded EU Asylum Pact is lengthy, and complicated, but most of its promises look like acquisitions to member states that have long complained they’re doing more than their fair share when it comes to processing and taking in refugees. The European Parliament has created a new “safe countries of origin” list which includes Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Kosovo, India, Morocco and Tunisia.
What’s more, they’ve promised to roll out new policy surrounding the list. Countries will be able to declare that an international protection applicant is not their responsibility without even having to examine their application; one of the reasons they can use to justify this decision is whether the applicant has a connection to one of these “safe countries”. This connection could be as tenuous as a family member having a pending application for that country – even if they haven’t yet been offered asylum there, even if you yourself have never been to that country, you can still be turned away and told to go join them.
The new EU Asylum Pact matters because it reflects a marked shift in European attitudes towards refugees; it would also make it a lot easier for member states to attempt responsibility-shifting schemes like in Albania and Rwanda.
The Future of Asylum in Europe
These externalisation processes raise important questions that continue to go unanswered. For instance: the Italy-Albania transfer policy will only apply to applicants from countries deemed “safe”, and pregnant women, children and “other vulnerable individuals”; but human rights organisations have raised alarms that there’s no clarification as to how those provisions will be made, verified or enforced. The EU-Turkiye deal first signed in 2016 would go on to trap thousands of asylum seekers in a legal limbo on Greek islands after their claims were rejected.
The UK-Rwanda deal was a failure on every financial and logistical level, and was derided as a “pointless exercise in performative cruelty” by one public health expert.
So where do we go from here? The stated goal of the Pact might be uniformity and efficiency, but it also clearly is designed to give member states more free reign to engage in future transfer schemes. The fact that the Pact will “oblige member states to establish a mechanism to monitor fundamental rights in relation to the border procedure” is, frankly, small comfort – considering the general failure of member states to uphold their responsibilities to asylum seekers even on the most basic levels like housing.
It’s impossible to separate asylum policy from wider power relationships between states. We’re fast approaching a world where EU citizens get to enjoy the benefits of this off-shoring, blissfully unaware of the real cost – not only to our neighbour states, but asylum seekers themselves.