By the end of the week, up to 40 migrants are expected to be transferred from Italy to the Albanian city of Gjader. This comes after the government issued a decree last month to start operating its facilities in Albania under a different categorization, changing the use of the centers to reparation hubs.
The Italian government hopes that it will finally succeed in sending people to the facilities it finished building in Albania last year without the interference of judges.
Those who are due to be transferred to Gjader this time are not asylum seekers intercepted at sea but instead be irregular migrants for whom deportation orders have already been issued and in whose cases judges have also authorized their transfer to repatriation centers.
To this end, the Italian government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had issued a decree on March 28, turning the facility built in Gjader into a repatriation center.
Currently, there are about 40 spots to house people at Gjader, with an aim to raise this to 144.
Italy's interior minister has been working on selecting candidates to take to Albania in recent days, and says that the journey of those to be sent to Albania will reportedly take place via the sea route, departing from a port in Italy's southern region of Puglia and going directly to the Gjader repatriation center.
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Legal wrangling for months
The government decree establishes that the two centers, which had originally been designed to fast-track asylum requests of migrants intercepted at sea, will be used to host failed asylum seekers who currently already are detained in Italian repatriation facilities and for whom deportation orders have been issued.
The government stressed that currently, there are only a small number of repatriation centers in Italy, making it impossible to host all those rejected asylum seekers who have been issued deportation orders.
Under Italian law, migrants can be detained up to a maximum of 18 months in such facilities, though it is unclear whether this timeframe equally applies to those outsourced to Albania.
According to the Italian government, the lack of hosting spaces in Italy also means that frequently, those who have been issued deportation orders can abscond and disappear, hoping that the measure of moving them to the new facilities in Albania will help prevent this in future.
Prior to declaring the facilities in Albania repatriation hubs, Rome had suggested that a new repatriation center could be built per region to stop failed asylum seekers from absconding; however, regional governments opposed this plan.
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Choosing whom to send to Albania
Not everyone who has been issued a deportation order, however, can always be sent back to their home country. Italy does not have mutual repatriation agreements with every country it deems to be a safe place of origin. In certain instances, details have to be hashed out between Italy and the governments it is dealing with.
The government hopes that such cases will be the ones most likely to be deferred to the repatriation hubs in Albania.
Countries, with which Italy has effective repatriation agreements in place -- such as Tunisia -- are much easier to directly deport to from Italian soil.
Despite this pragmatic approach, many opposition voices remain critical of the plan.
A parliamentary delegation is ready to depart for Albania in time to monitor "the criteria on the basis of which the people transferred were selected, to verify the way in which they are transferred, and the conditions" in which they are detained.
Meanwhile, the association for legal studies on immigration (ASGI) in Italy also blasted the move, saying that "the forced transfer beyond national borders of people" creates "a deep fracture" in the judicial system.
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