Detailed report/ Here's how much the Albania-Italy agreement cost for migrants

2025-07-24 19:13:00, Aktualitet CNA

Detailed report/ Here's how much the Albania-Italy agreement cost for

A report published this Thursday contains details and figures regarding the Albania-Italy agreement on migrants.

According to the report, setting up a place for immigrants in Albania cost over 153,000 euros.

Regarding costs, emphasis is placed on the figure of 528,000 euros, which were spent on accommodation and food for police personnel alone in 2024 for five days of operation of the centers.

FULL REPORT:

The "Detainees" platform provides new, previously unpublished data on 14 active detention centers in Italy and Albania. Operation "Albania" has been called the most expensive, inhumane and futile in the history of Italian migration policies. The Prefecture of Rome paid 570,000 euros to the management agency Medihospes for five days of actual operations: 114,000 euros per day to detain 20 people between mid-October and the end of December 2024, all of whom were released within a few hours.

ActionAid and the University of Bari have revealed for the first time how many millions have actually been spent on setting up the centers in Gjadra and Shëngjin by March 2025, despite the centers not being completed.

The construction of a free place in Albania cost over 153,000 euros. The comparison with the costs of building similar facilities in Italy is bleak: in 2024, the CTRA of Porto Empedocle (AG) cost 1 million euros to create 50 places (just over 21,000 euros per place).

Reduced system capacity and empty places. At the end of 2024, there were 11 detention centres for repatriation (DRC), for an official capacity of 1,522 places in the detention system for foreigners. To this must be added the 1,033 places officially created in the three asylum detention centres (DRC), bringing the total capacity to 2,555. However, due to delays in the construction of facilities, repeated protests and ongoing damage to facilities, the system is operating at 46% of its official capacity at the end of 2024.

"Given 263 empty places out of a total of 1,164 available," explains Fabrizio Coresi, migration expert for ActionAid, "the attempt to use the center in Gjader to detain the irregular foreign population present in Italy seems completely unreasonable and illogical."

Repatriations at historic low since 2014. The main justification for the existence of CPRs is that they make repatriation policies more effective. However, the use of detention only increases the economic and human costs of repatriations and, despite requiring longer timeframes (up to 18 months, starting from September 2023), does not affect the number of repatriations carried out. The year 2024 marked the lowest number since 2014: only 41.8% (2,576) of people who entered a detention centre, out of a total of 6,164, were repatriated. Despite the ever-increasing resources diverted to administrative detention, even in 2024, only 10.4% of those who received a removal order were repatriated by Italian CPRs.

The New Function of Pre-Trial Detention. The number of asylum seekers in the pre-trial detention system has increased in recent years, reaching over 45% of those detained in 2024. 21% of them had not yet received a removal order, but were held only as asylum seekers. "The use of pre-trial detention as a tool of asylum policy marks an important paradigm shift, raising serious questions about the objectives of an instrument with such an impact on people's fundamental rights," says Giuseppe Campesi of the University of Bari. "These questions have been directly reflected in the significant increase in releases due to the failure of judicial authorities to confirm or extend pre-trial detention orders."

Costs out of control. In 2024, the cost of the detention system was almost 96 million euros, more than the total spent in the previous six years (just under 93 million euros). Moreover, among the various unaccounted costs, a prime example of waste of resources is "Albania". 528,000 euros were spent on accommodation and food for police personnel alone in 2024 for five days of operation of the centers.

The investment in the detention system since 2017 continues uninterrupted, despite being practically unmanageable and structurally violent, violating fundamental rights and pathogenic. A system that between 2024 and the first months of 2025 has resulted in three deaths, adding to the more than 30 deaths in administrative detention in Italy.

For this reason, ActionAid and the Department of Political Science at the University of Bari have decided to include in the platform, among the indicators related to individual facilities, a register of the main critical events (riots, accidents, suicides, etc.) that occur there. This aims to highlight, beyond the data, the human cost of the system and to consider the effects of the darkest immigration policies on the people forced to endure them. /CNA