Albanian Foreign Minister Ferit Hoxha has told Rome that the controversial protocol allowing Italy to operate migrant centres on Albanian soil will not be extended beyond 2030. The reason being, he expects Albania to be an EU member state by then. The announcement has drawn sharp criticism from Italy’s opposition parties, who called the scheme a costly failure.
The five-year Italy-Albania Protocol on migrants was ratified in 2024, granting Rome the right to establish and operate two migrant centres on Albanian territory. The rationale underpinning the deal was straightforward, by processing and detaining migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean outside the EU’s borders, Italy could deter irregular arrivals, since those held in Albania would not achieve their objective of reaching European territory.
Speaking to Euractiv, Foreign Minister Hoxha was unambiguous about the deal’s fate. “First of all, it’s for five years and I’m not sure that there will be an extension,” he said. “Second, there will be no extension because we will be a member of the European Union. Once Albania joins, that is no longer extraterritorial, it’s the territory of the European Union.”
A project mired in legal disputes
The announcement comes after months of turbulence surrounding the scheme. Since the centres opened in October 2024, legal challenges have restricted full use of the facilities, with some migrants returned to Italy after courts refused to uphold their detention. The first three groups of 73 migrants transferred last autumn and winter were returned to Italy within hours, as magistrates refused to validate their detention outside the EU.
In March 2025, the Italian government issued a decree repurposing the facilities as repatriation centres for rejected asylum seekers already in Italy, rather than for new Mediterranean arrivals. Since April 2025, six groups of migrants, around 140 in total, have been transferred directly from pre-removal detention centres in Italy to Albania, with only 27 migrants left in the centres as of early August 2025. By October, numbers had fallen further still; on 7 October 2025, there were only 17 people detained in Gjadër.
Over the entire first year of operation, just 111 people passed through the entrance at Gjadër between October 2024 and July 2025, with operations suspended several times due to a series of legal setbacks.
The figures have intensified scrutiny of the scheme’s value for money. The Gjadër centre has a capacity of 400 places, and 74.2 million euros was paid out in contracts for its construction and the smaller processing centre at Shengjin — amounting to more than 153,000 euros per place created. The total projected cost of the deal has been put at around 800 million euros, with the Meloni government allocating 670 million euros of Italian taxpayers’ money to build and maintain the centres.
Political responses
Despite Hoxha’s comments, the Italian Interior Ministry struck a conciliatory tone. A statement issued after Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi met his Albanian counterpart Besfort Lamallari confirmed that cooperation between Rome and Tirana on the protocol is continuing. Piantedosi also reiterated Italy’s support for Albania’s EU accession bid.
Italy’s opposition, however, wasted no time in seizing on the development. Enzo Amendola, the Democratic Party’s leader on the Lower House foreign affairs committee, said, “What Giorgia Meloni and the Right had portrayed as a model for the European Union has become the dregs of migration policy from which even Albania is now distancing itself. The words of Albanian Foreign Minister Ferit Hoxha certify the political failure of a project that began poorly and has only gotten worse.”
Leaders of the 5-Star Movement were equally blunt, describing the migrant centres as “an embarrassing, colossal waste of public money, built on propaganda and foundering in reality.” He called on Meloni to apologise to the Italian people.
