Albania has announced that it will not renew its migrant agreement with Italy, due to expire in 2030, undermining Rome’s flagship model for tackling illegal migration and its broader attempt to position it as a blueprint for European Union policy.
The agreement allows Rome to process certain asylum claims in facilities on Albanian territory. It was was presented by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government as an innovative tool to deter irregular arrivals, disrupt smuggling networks and relieve pressure on Italy’s asylum system.
It also formed part of a broader attempt to encourage similar external processing arrangements across the EU.
Albanian foreign minister Igli Hasani announced in an interview published by Euractiv yesterday, though, that Tirana does not intend to extend the agreement beyond its 2030 expiration date.
He said his country expects to have joined the EU by then, making the continuation of such arrangements for a fellow member state politically and legally incompatible with its future status inside the bloc.
The Italy–Albania protocol had been signed in November 2023 by Meloni and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. It quickly became a cornerstone of Italy’s migration policy.
Under the deal, migrants intercepted by Italian authorities at sea or on Italian territory could be transferred to facilities built and managed by Italian personnel in Albania, where their asylum claims would be processed outside EU territory.
The initiative had received a broadly cautious but generally favourable reception from the European Commission. It avoided formally endorsing it as an EU model but described it as an “innovative approach” that could be explored provided it remained fully compliant with EU law and fundamental rights obligations.
So far, the project had led to the construction of two main Italian-managed facilities in Albania, designed as reception and processing hubs for transferred migrants. The Italian state has invested an estimated €1 billion in the scheme, covering infrastructure, security and operational costs.
Despite this substantial expenditure, though, only a limited number of migrants — estimated in the low hundreds — had actually passed through the centres. That is due in part to legal challenges and Italian court rulings that repeatedly slowed the process, raising questions about the cost-effectiveness and operational impact of the model.
At the same time, Albania had continued to advance its EU accession process. Negotiations formally opened in July 2022 after years of delays linked to rule-of-law reforms, corruption concerns and divisions among member states.
Since then, Brussels had accelerated the process as part of a broader strategy to stabilise the Western Balkans and counter external geopolitical influence from Russia and China.
Although no accession date had been set, EU officials had suggested that Albania could join before the end of the decade if reforms continued.
Tirana’s announcement, therefore, went beyond a bilateral issue between Rome and Albania. It highlighted growing uncertainty around the EU’s wider “externalisation” approach, which relies on third countries to manage migration flows on Europe’s behalf.
As things stood, the centres were expected to remain formally operational until at least the end of the agreement in 2029–2030 but their effective use depended entirely on whether Italian courts continued to authorise transfers.
In practice, this meant they could remain structurally open but only intermittently or minimally active if judicial blockages persisted, raising questions about their long-term viability even before the political deadline set by Tirana.
For Meloni, the implications were politically sensitive. The Albania agreement had been central to her argument that Europe must shift from humanitarian management of migration towards deterrence, border control and external processing.
A clear end date, without prospects for renewal, risks turning one of the EU’s most ambitious anti-irregular migration experiments into a time-limited policy with significant financial cost and limited operational results.
