The European Parliament has endorsed the creation of offshore migrant return hubs outside EU territory, exactly the model Italy pioneered with its controversial Albania deal. Meloni is celebrating, but her own centres have been frozen by the courts for months, and the price tag has soared to seven times the equivalent cost in Italy itself.
Giorgia Meloni wasted no time on Thursday in declaring Thursday’s European Parliament vote on a new return regulation a personal and political victory. “Europe is finally moving in the right direction, along a path that Italy has strongly supported,” she wrote on social media, hailing the passage of rules that formally enable EU member states to establish return hubs — processing and detention facilities for rejected asylum seekers — in third countries outside the bloc’s borders. The vote, carried 389 to 206 with 32 abstentions, endorses the model Italy has been championing since it signed its landmark deal with Albania in November 2023.
In Meloni’s telling, the EU has caught up with Italy. “The Meloni government’s line has become the European line,” said FdI MEP Nicola Procaccini, co-chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists group in Strasbourg. It is a narrative the premier has cultivated carefully: that her government was simply ahead of its time, that Italian judges were obstacles rather than arbiters, and that patience and persistence in Brussels would ultimately vindicate her flagship migration policy.
The decisive changes introduced by this regulation will make it possible to guarantee this straightforward principle: if you come to Europe illegally, rest assured that you will not stay here.
François-Xavier Bellamy, EPP MEP, France
Reality vs ideal of Albania return hubs
The reality on the ground in Albania is considerably more complicated. Italy’s two facilities, a reception and identification centre in Shengjin and a detention facility in Gjadër, constructed at a cost estimated by one Italian university at over €800 million over five years, have been almost entirely empty for months.
Between October 2024 and January 2025, only three batches of migrants, totalling 73 people, were transferred to the centres. All were ordered back to Italy within days after Italian judges refused to validate their detention, ruling each time that the asylum seekers’ countries of origin did not qualify as fully “safe” under EU law.
The August 2025 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) was the pivotal blow. In cases involving two Bangladeshi nationals, the court found that Italy’s practice of designating entire countries as uniformly “safe” for return violated EU asylum law. The EU law requires the designation to be valid for all individuals in that country. Italian magistrates applied the judgment three times in quick succession, blocking each new transfer attempt. Similarly, the government’s repeated efforts to update its “safe country” list were rejected by Rome’s courts. Meloni accused the judiciary of political interference, with government figures denouncing “communist judges.” The opposition pointed to empty, expensive buildings.
EU Pact on Migration and Asylum saw shift in Meloni’s favour
What has kept Meloni’s hope alive, and what Thursday’s vote reinforces, is that the EU’s legal framework is itself now shifting. The new EU Asylum and Migration Pact which is due to take full effect in June 2026, will, for the first time, explicitly permit member states to designate countries as safe with exceptions for specific, clearly identifiable groups. This was precisely the flexibility that Italy lacked under the previous rules. The ECJ itself noted in its August ruling that this change was coming. In November 2025, speaking alongside Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, Meloni was explicit: “Certainly, the protocol will work when the new migration and asylum pact comes into effect. When the pact comes into effect, the centres will operate exactly as they should have from the beginning.”
Thursday’s return regulation vote does not change that calculus immediately — it still requires negotiations between Parliament, Council and Commission before it becomes binding law, and member states will then need to transpose it. But it is a powerful political signal that a majority in the Parliament, secured by the EPP mainstream conservatives aligning with far-right groups, supports the externalisation model that Italy pioneered.
Who is watching the Italy-Albania return hubs model?
A number of European countries have been watching the Italy-Albania model battle its way through the courts.
The UK angle adds a particular layer of interest. The Labour government that came to power in July 2024 immediately scrapped the former Conservative administration’s Rwanda scheme. That scheme had sought to send asylum seekers who arrived via irregular routes to Rwanda for processing, a policy that had similarly been mired in years of legal challenge before ever being fully implemented. Labour ministers have since found themselves confronting the same political pressures that drove the Rwanda plan: record small-boat crossings in the English Channel and intense public pressure to demonstrate control of irregular arrivals. The Albania scheme’s profile among potential alternative models has risen accordingly, even if Labour has been careful not to say so publicly.
The new EU return regulation approved Thursday also contains provisions that go significantly beyond the return-hub concept. The law will increase the maximum legal detention period for those awaiting return to 24 months — less than the 30 months sought by the Council — and introduces what critics describe as practically unlimited entry bans for those returned. A Parliament-added provision would also allow talks with “non-recognised third country entities” for the purposes of readmission, a clause that drew sharp condemnation from Green MEPs who warned it could pave the way for cooperation with the Taliban on the forced return of Afghan nationals.
Light at the end of a week of setbacks for Italian government
For Meloni, however, this was a week that began with a referendum defeat and three government resignations, and ends, at least on migration, with something that looks like a win. The premier has staked considerable political capital on the proposition that her approach to irregular migration is not just Italian policy, but the direction Europe was always going to travel.
With 389 MEPs voting in favour of the return regulation, she has a number to point to. The harder task, making the Albania centres actually function, will follow in the months ahead, as the new EU pact enters into force and Italy’s government attempts to translate a political narrative into operational reality.
