Reportage
Italy’s Albanian centers are ‘a monument to waste and propaganda’
Rachele Scarpa: ‘Just to avoid showing the world the image of a center becoming completely empty, the government has been illegally transferring people from Italian CPRs to the Albanian one all summer.’
More than a year after it opened and after it went through several phases, a total of only around 220 people have passed through the Repatriation Center (CPR) in Gjader, Albania; it currently holds 25 people. The details emerged following an inspection of the center by Deputies Rachele Scarpa and Matteo Orfini (PD) and Riccardo Magi (+Europa).
This shows that the center has always been used far below capacity. The facility, which has 96 places available out of 144 projected, was initially set up for accelerated border procedures and later converted into a CPR by a decree in April. The section at the port of Shengjin, intended for border procedures and built for 880 places, remains completely unused, as does the prison built on Albanian soil near the centers.
“A monument to waste and propaganda. Just to avoid showing the world the image of a center becoming completely empty, the government has been illegally transferring people from Italian CPRs to the Albanian one all summer,” Scarpa stated at the end of the inspection.
At the end of May, Italy's Court of Cassation raised doubts about the legality of this second phase of the project, after an initial phase in which it was meant to be a center for accelerated border procedures – a scenario shelved following the August 1 ruling by the European Court of Justice on “safe countries.” The Italian high court judges are still not convinced that the Gjader CPR complies with the EU’s Return Directive and Reception Directive.
The government, while silent, has continued to ignore the ruling, and transfers to Albania have proceeded slowly but inexorably. At the beginning of August, at the time of a visit by the Lazio region’s Ombudsmen for Detainees, a total of 140 people had been held there; another 80 have passed through Gjader in the last three months.
“There is enormous suffering: acts of self-harm, swallowed razor blades, suicide attempts. That's why I'm glad that this center you see is half-empty. There are more police officers than detainees,” Riccardo Magi commented on Tuesday. The log of critical events showed 95 such incidents, 20 more than at the last inspection in July. Most of these involve self-harm, but the MPs reported that a hunger strike by several detainees had ended just two days ago.
The average detention time, according to what the deputies learned, is short – just 15 days. The transfers take place from other Italian CPRs in groups of 10, aboard aircraft belonging to the Italian Finance Police, approximately every two weeks, based on the frequency with which new identification numbers show up in the facility’s records.
The number of actual repatriations is also vanishingly small: in approximately 70% of cases, the detentions have not been validated by a judge, and since April, the Rome Court of Appeal has been ordering that those who apply for asylum from Gjader must be returned to Italy. In any case, even those who end up repatriated must go back through Italy first; on Tuesday, the facility’s managers categorically denied that there had been any further direct repatriations from Albania since the transfer of five Egyptian citizens from Gjader in May.
“The bottom line refutes the government's entire narrative and confirms that the entire operation has no practical use, other than to fuel propaganda,” Scarpa concluded.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/un-momumento-alla-propaganda-i-centri-in-albania-sono-semideserti on 2025-10-28