British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new ‘far right’ mission to lock up asylum seekers in distant countries yesterday suffered an embarrassing setback on live television.
The former human rights supremo – who cancelled the Tory Rwanda scheme on day one in office – was in Tirana, less than one year later, to discuss setting up a similar scheme in Albania.
Or so the media were led to believe in press briefings beforehand: that it would be a main item on the agenda at his bilateral meeting with Albania’s socialist Prime Minister Edi Rami.
Italy’s conservative Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has already launched such a scheme in Albania. She is still called ‘far right’ by most media
But at their joint press conference, Rami soon put the kybosh on the idea by announcing most undiplomatically that such a deal would never happen.
In evident discomfort, Sir Keir did not respond to what Rami had said but spoke instead of talks he is having ‘with a number of countries’ about similar schemes. These are thought to include Serbia, Bosnia and North Macedonia.
Sir Keir remains in Tirana today for the biannual meeting of the European Political Community of 47 nations.
His trip to Albania comes hard on the heels of his ‘island of strangers’ speech on Monday in which he announced it is ‘time to take back control’ of Britain. The speech came after Reform’s recent local election triumph and surging popularity (one poll this week has Nigel Farage’s party on 33 per cent, Labour on 21 per cent and the Tories on 16 per cent).
The Albania scheme would have involved construction of what is euphemistically called a ‘return hub’ – i.e. a prison – paid for and run by Britain to house and deport failed British asylum seekers.
Italy’s conservative Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has already launched such a scheme in Albania. She is still called ‘far right’ by most media above all for her tough stance on illegal immigration.
Yet in Tirana yesterday, Sir Keir described such ‘return hubs’ as ‘a really important innovation’. So what should we call him?
Meloni’s scheme consists of two separate structures: one for identification and processing, the other for detention.
Starmer has had two bilateral meetings with Meloni – in Rome last September, and in London in March – and praised her ‘remarkable progress’ on illegal migration.
There has been considerable interest in Meloni’s Albania scheme, not just from Starmer but from both left and right-wing leaders across Europe, increasingly desperate to find effective solutions to the ever-worsening migrant crisis.
But they, like him, will have to find somewhere else to house theirs.
For as Rama, who earlier this week was elected for a fourth term, spelled out at yesterday’s joint press conference:
‘I have been very clear since day one when we started this process with Italy that this was a one-off because of our very close relationship… [and] the geographical situation which makes a lot of sense. We have been asked by several countries if we were open to it, and we have said “no”, because we are loyal to the marriage with Italy and the rest is just love.’
The Albanian Prime Minister was referring, not to the annexation of Albania in 1939 by Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, but to its decision in the early 1990s to allow tens of thousands of Albanians to remain in Italy who had arrived by boat in Puglia in the south after the collapse of Communism.
But what he said yesterday he has said countless times in the past few years.
Even more bizarre than the apparent ignorance of Sir Keir and his advisers about Rama’s refusal to strike similar deals with any other country apart from Italy, is their apparent ignorance as well about the immense legal obstacles such schemes involve.
Sir Keir, as a top human rights lawyer, surely knows all this like the back of his hand as those obstacles stem primarily from human rights laws. So why is he pushing the idea so hard?
Meloni’s original plan was – and remains – to transfer to Albania only migrants from safe countries of origin (thus theoretically not refugees) picked up in the Mediterranean by the Italian coastguard and naval vessels. The plan was to ferry them straight to Albania without them setting foot in Italy. Their asylum applications – given their safe country of origin status – would then be dealt with after a month, with deportation soon afterwards. Safe country migrants who actually reach Italy cannot be transferred to Albania and their asylum applications often take years to process.
Most migrants who arrive in Italy by sea from Tunisia and Libya are from safe countries of origin. Bangladesh is the top country of origin and can hardly be considered unsafe – unless every country outside the ‘Global North’ is unsafe.
Meloni’s scheme seemed like a game changer, hence all the interest throughout the bloc. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised it as ‘out of the box thinking’.
The scheme launched last October but judges in Rome immediately stopped it dead. They refused to approve the detention in Albania of the first migrants sent there who were from Bangladesh and Egypt (another safe country) – on the grounds that both countries were in part unsafe. The judges referred the matter to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg seeking clarity. It is due to issue a ruling in early June.
Meloni was forced to suspend the scheme pending the Luxembourg court ruling. Meanwhile, she has begun to send to Albania failed asylum seekers, mainly from safe countries of origin, for detention pending deportation.
This is precisely what Sir Keir has in mind with his off-shore ‘return hubs’, if he can find a willing country. They too, however, are vulnerable to legal challenge. As he must know.
The only really effective way to stop mass illegal immigration to Italy is to stop migrants setting off from North Africa across the Mediterranean. Meloni and the EU have had some success here thanks to deals with Tunisia and Libya which give them hefty cash incentives to stop departures.
But if Meloni is ever allowed to detain safe country of origin migrants in Albania, then fast-track their asylum applications and deport them, it could prove a game changer, especially as it would also act as a powerful deterrent.
But Britain’s real migrant problem is not the illegal migrants arriving across the Channel from that well-known unsafe country, France. No, it is the hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrive legally in Britain each year. Between 2014 and 2024, net migration to Britain (the difference between the number who emigrated and immigrated) was over four million. What does Sir Keir have in mind with regard to them?
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