The future of the EU and its enlargement may be playing out in a small town north of Tirana. Gjadër has few inhabitants left. There is a café, but even its modest prices are too high for local pensioners, who prefer to share a beer from the grocer next door. In the days of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s ‘Chinese comrades’ – its closest allies between 1961 and 1979 – built an airbase here.

Today, a rectangle of tall metal fences stands on the tarmac, enclosing 12-square-metre container units under constant video surveillance. There is also a detention unit. The camp heralds the EU’s new migration policy, which is supported by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

In a letter to EU leaders, von der Leyen called the camp an ‘example of out-of-the-box thinking, based on fair sharing of responsibilities with third countries’. She has long been an advocate of outsourcing asylum policies, and since 2020 she has been in favour of abolishing the Dublin Regulation, which distributed asylum applications among European countries, instead proposing ‘a new European system for managing migration’. The Migreurop network of activists and researchers sees this as an attempt to replace ‘a Europe of solidarity in reception’ with ‘a Europe united in keeping people on the move at a distance from European territory’.

The Pact on Migration and Asylum, which was approved by the EU parliament in 2024 and came into force on 12 June this year, enshrines this approach in law. The pact extends the outsourcing of border controls and permits the creation of ‘return centres’ outside the EU for those refused asylum. Fifteen EU countries reportedly wanted to go further. On 15 May 2024 they asked the European Commission to devise mechanisms for ‘detecting, intercepting, or in cases of distress, rescuing migrants on the high seas and bringing them to a predetermined place of safety in a partner country outside the EU’.

Return centre for those (…)

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