In October an Italian navy ship carrying 16 migrants docked in Shëngjin in Albania. The men on board were the first of potentially tens of thousands of migrants to have claims processed in Albania as part of a new migration deal with Italy. 

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, addressing the country’s Senate, said that the five-year deal marked an ‘unprecedented’ path, ‘but one that perfectly reflects the European spirit and that has all the credentials to be followed also with other non-EU nations.’

Not long after arriving in Albania, four of the migrants were returned to Italy after it emerged that two of them were minors, while the others were medically unwell. Soon after, an immigration court in Rome ordered the remaining 12 to be sent back to Italy too, because the countries they were from – Bangladesh and Egypt – were considered unsafe for them to return to.  

The Rome judgment was based on a recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which said a country outside the EU cannot be declared ‘safe’ unless its entire territory is deemed free of danger. 

‘The view of the Labour government was that Rwanda wouldn’t work and it was very expensive,’ says Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. Walsh says the new government has remained ‘tight-lipped’ on any new deterrent approach to tackling irregular migration. However, following a meeting with the Italian government in September, the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer KC told reporters that he discussed the ‘concept’ of the Italy-Albania deal, which is administered by the Italian government and falls under its jurisdiction. 

Walsh says all the indications are that the UK would pursue a scheme more akin to Italy’s approach. ‘I presume [any UK deal] would be based on that model,’ he says, ‘which is that people would be processed under UK asylum rules, even if abroad, and if they’re successful, then they would gain legal residence in the UK – so quite a departure from Rwanda, which was designed on the principle of a one-way ticket.’

The UK government has doubled down on enforcement and launched a Border Security Command to tackle people-smuggling gangs. The £150m package will enhance tech hubs, enforcement and intelligence, and fund new staff, including specialist investigators at the UK’s National Crime Agency. The package will also give the Crown Prosecution Service capacity to rule more quickly on international organised crime cases.

In early November, the UK signed new agreements with Kosovo, North Macedonia and Serbia ‘to clamp down on organised immigration crime abroad’. An estimated 100,000 migrants transited through the Western Balkans in 2023, making it a key route into the EU and the UK. The UK already has a similar intelligence-sharing partnership with other countries. However, the Home Office declined to comment on whether it was considering replicating an Italy-Albania migration deal with any other countries. 

Walsh concedes the scale of the challenge, involving large stretches of coastline, far-reaching criminal networks and agile smuggling operations on the ground, is immense. Nicolas Rollason, Co-Chair of the IBA Immigration and Nationality Law Committee and Head of Business Immigration at Kingsley Napley in London, is however encouraged by the UK’s new approach. ‘There’s a definite shift in policy, away from demonising migrants themselves to focussing on the gangs and people smugglers, which is welcome,’ he says. 

Much like the UK’s Rwanda plan, the Italy-Albania deal has provoked outcry among human rights groups. However, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said other EU Member States can draw ‘lessons from the Italy-Albania protocol’ as it proceeds in practice, and that countries should also ‘continue to explore possible ways forward as regards the idea of developing return hubs outside the EU’ to tackle irregular migration into the bloc. The notion of ‘return hubs’ was also a key talking point during a recent EU summit.

Rollason is concerned about the message that the EU’s tacit endorsement of such schemes is sending. ‘That’s how they’ve been recast and rebranded, but basically they’re just internment camps for migrants,’ he says. ‘They’re trying to make it sound clean and new, but this rebranding has nothing to do with human beings.’

More change is afoot following the approval of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact earlier in 2024. The new rules are set to reform how the bloc manages migration and enable a higher number of asylum claims to be fast-tracked at the EU’s external borders. The Pact entered force in June, but the majority of the new rules will apply from mid-2026. 

The Pact doesn’t include a recast of the 2008 Return Directive – the primary legal framework in recent years for returning third-country nationals staying or entering the EU irregularly. A European Commission spokesperson told Global Insight that return hubs would only be used ‘for persons whose asylum application is rejected’ and who ‘have no right to stay’ in the EU. They added that there was an ‘ongoing discussion’ at the Commission about how to increase returns and that Magnus Brunner, the Commissioner-designate for Internal Affairs and Migration, was expected to ‘take new initiatives to step up returns.’

Rollason says there’s a risk the Pact will ‘formalise and legitimise some of the very unsavoury practices and pushbacks’ that have been taking place across Europe’s borders. ‘Depending on how that develops, my concern is that the “mainstreaming” of these questionable practices may embolden the UK to look at other processes that are more similar to what the EU is doing,’ he says.
 

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