On 9 May 2025, Italy deported five Egyptian migrants from its detention facility at Gjadër, Albania, directly to Cairo. The operation marked a new step in the controversial Italy–Albania arrangement and raised questions about the men’s access to legal protection and what would happen to them after their return.
The agreement was initially presented as a way to process certain asylum applications outside Italian territory. Its use for detention and removal has become part of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s wider effort to restrict irregular migration. Italy’s designation of Egypt as a safe country of origin is also central to the debate, although that label does not remove the obligation to examine an individual’s protection needs.
Altreconomia’s reporting identified a €113,850 contract for the charter operation. The aircraft flew from Rome to Tirana, remained there for roughly an hour and a half, and continued to Cairo with the five men. Their names and ages were not publicly disclosed in the material reviewed for this report.
The Refugees Platform in Egypt criticised the removals, while Italian MP Rachele Scarpa questioned their legality under European return rules and the Italian constitution. These objections form part of an ongoing legal and political dispute; they should not be confused with a final court ruling on every aspect of the agreement.
For rights advocates, moving people beyond Europe’s borders does not move governments beyond their responsibility to protect them.
Nour Khalil, executive director of the Refugees Platform, tells Zawia3 that deportations affecting Egyptians have become increasingly complex. He argues that different mechanisms are being used to bypass safeguards and deny people a meaningful opportunity to seek asylum.
He describes the Albanian facilities as closed detention centres rather than the reception centres portrayed in political messaging, and says confinement, isolation and restricted access to lawyers make it difficult to prepare a protection claim.
Khalil points to Italian judicial decisions that prevented earlier groups from remaining in Albania and required their return to Italy. Those decisions concerned detention and the legal basis for the procedures; they did not amount to a general constitutional judgment striking down the entire bilateral agreement.
One factual point also requires clarification: Albania is a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, having acceded in August 1992. The controversy over the Italian centres therefore concerns the specific arrangements, jurisdiction and effective safeguards—not Albania’s absence from the convention.
Opaque removals and the “safe country” label
Khalil says the five Egyptians’ detention and removal took place without adequate public scrutiny. He describes the process as secretive and argues that the absence of information from Italian and Egyptian authorities makes it difficult to establish whether the men had a real opportunity to challenge their deportation.
In his interview, he estimated the flight cost at €130,000. The documented contract figure reported by Altreconomia is €113,850; the two figures should not be presented as if they were identical.
He stresses that Egyptians are not the only nationality affected. Tunisians and others face similar policies, whether through offshore detention or accelerated procedures associated with safe-country lists.
“The risk differs from one person to another, even within the same country,” Khalil says. A place considered safe for one adult man, he argues, may not be safe for a woman, a member of a religious or ethnic minority, or a political opponent.
He contrasts the collective presumption of safety with prima facie recognition of refugees in situations of widespread danger, such as war and mass displacement. In the latter case, group-based recognition can facilitate protection; he argues that safe-country presumptions can work in the opposite direction by making it harder to obtain it.
Safe-country concepts do exist in European asylum law. The legal question is whether their designation and use satisfy the applicable conditions and preserve individual assessment and an effective remedy. In an October 2024 judgment, the Court of Justice of the European Union specified limits on such designations under the rules then in force, including that a designation had to cover the country’s entire territory.
Khalil’s criticism is that governments use the mechanism to reduce accepted claims and accelerate removals in practice, particularly for people from countries such as Egypt whose citizens continue to take dangerous routes to Europe.
Allegations that follow migrants across borders
Khalil argues that both external processing and fast-track procedures inside Italy can leave applicants without enough time to gather evidence or obtain effective legal assistance. He estimates that fewer than 5% of Egyptian applications over the preceding three years were accepted, although he did not provide the underlying dataset or specify which forms of protection were included. That estimate should not be treated as a verified Europe-wide recognition rate.
He also alleges that many deportees face serious abuses on return to Egypt, including prosecution on smuggling accusations and placement in successive cases—known as “rotation”—to prolong detention.
According to Khalil, some people described as smugglers were migrants who had been persuaded or compelled to steer boats in exchange for reduced passage costs. He argues that arrest figures can be used to demonstrate border-control performance to external funders without adequately distinguishing organisers from passengers.
“There are Egyptians in Italy who spent six years in prison on smuggling charges and were then held in deportation centres,” he says. He alleges that some were pressured to sign papers describing their return as voluntary, only to face new accusations after reaching Egypt.
He further criticises extremely long sentences imposed in some European boat-smuggling cases, citing cumulative terms reaching thousands of years. Such headline totals are not necessarily the period a person would actually serve. His central concern is the quality of evidence, interpretation and legal representation, and what he describes as hearings too short to provide a fair examination.
Khalil warns against turning Egypt into a regional return hub for both Egyptians and other nationalities. He points to documented concerns about detention conditions and torture, arguing that governments must assess the risk to each person before removal.
The governing principle is non-refoulement: a person must not be sent to a place where they face a real risk of persecution, torture or other prohibited harm. The presence of serious abuses in a country makes scrutiny essential; the legal assessment must still address the individual and the applicable protection obligations.
European documents discuss Egyptian nationals among people suspected of involvement in migrant-smuggling networks. Suspicion and nationality are not proof of an individual’s guilt, and migrant smuggling and human trafficking are distinct offences.
Rights groups cite cases such as the nine Egyptians prosecuted after the Pylos shipwreck in Greece as examples of the dangers of assigning criminal responsibility to survivors without adequately testing the evidence. Their criticism concerns the handling of the case and the treatment of survivors, rather than a claim that every Egyptian investigated in Europe is innocent or every prosecution unlawful.
Khalil also alleges that people intercepted at sea and returned to Egypt have faced smuggling accusations, including survivors who had suffered injuries. He says his organisation has received information about non-Egyptians, including Syrians and Pakistanis, whose whereabouts were unknown after return. These are allegations attributed to the organisation; the report does not establish the fate of each person.
For Khalil, the harm is cumulative: detention, restricted access to protection, removal and possible abuse after arrival cannot be examined as separate, unrelated events.
Individual protection, collective presumptions
Karim Ennarah, research director at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, also challenges the logic of safe-country lists. He says refugee protection is fundamentally concerned with an individual’s fear of persecution, not only with whether their country is experiencing a civil war.
He points to the 1969 Organisation of African Unity refugee convention, which broadened protection in Africa to include people fleeing circumstances such as external aggression, occupation and events seriously disturbing public order.
In theory, Ennarah explains, a safe-country designation should not mean automatic rejection. Governments present accelerated examination as a way to reduce pressure on asylum systems. In practice, he argues, it risks creating a presumption among officials and judges that the applicant does not need protection.
“Whether someone is entitled to protection must be determined through an individual assessment of each case,” Ennarah says.
He believes that attempts to dispose of cases quickly can undermine the safeguards built into international and national law, including meaningful access to appeal before a person is exposed to irreversible harm.
Ennarah places these developments in the context of increasingly hostile European migration politics and the rise of the far right. Migrants and refugees, he says, have become easy targets for political gain, while governments search for legal mechanisms to reduce the number of people able to remain.
He describes externalisation as an attempt to shift responsibilities onto countries outside the European Union, including Egypt, Türkiye and Jordan. Financial incentives and bilateral arrangements may secure temporary accommodation or containment, he argues, while exposing people to further violations.
Ennarah says the Italy–Albania arrangement remains open to legal challenge, including scrutiny under constitutional and European human-rights standards. As of this report in July 2025, the existence of litigation should not be presented as a final judgment resolving all of those questions.
What the migration figures do—and do not—show
Economic pressure, shrinking opportunities and political conditions continue to push Egyptians towards irregular routes. Libya remains an important departure point for those seeking to cross the central Mediterranean to Italy.
The nationality of a person arriving in Europe must be distinguished from the country where their boat departed. Egyptian officials’ claim that irregular migration boats had stopped leaving Egypt’s own coastline does not mean Egyptian citizens had stopped reaching Europe through Libya or elsewhere.
Egyptians were among the leading nationalities arriving in Italy in 2022, with more than 20,000 arrivals. In 2023, Mixed Migration Centre analysis put the total at 11,515 out of 157,651 sea arrivals—just over 7%, and the fifth-largest nationality group. These figures do not support a claim of uninterrupted year-on-year growth in Egyptian arrivals to Italy.
The EU Agency for Asylum’s July 2022 report also distinguished different reporting periods and measures. It cited 3,292 detections of Egyptian nationals on the central Mediterranean route between January and May 2022. For January–April, 2,355 of 2,601 detections involving Egyptians across routes—91%—were on that route.
These are border-crossing detections, not necessarily a count of unique people. They should not be combined indiscriminately with Italy’s sea-arrival totals or used to claim a global ranking for an entire later year.
Children have long been part of the picture. An IOM report from 2016 recorded 638 unaccompanied Egyptian minors arriving in Italy in April that year, compared with 18 in April 2015. Those historical figures illustrate an earlier pattern; they are not evidence of the number arriving in 2025.
In April 2025, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty reiterated Egypt’s position that it had stopped irregular departures from its shores and was hosting people fleeing conflict. Officials have also pointed to awareness campaigns and safer-migration initiatives.
Egypt’s principal anti-smuggling legislation is Law No. 82 of 2016, not a law first enacted in 2020. Its distinction between smugglers and smuggled migrants is particularly relevant to the concerns raised by rights advocates.
Political-economy lecturer Karim El-Omda, speaking previously to Zawia3, argues that enforcement alone cannot resolve the problem. Across Africa, migration is driven by interacting pressures: war, persecution, economic hardship and a lack of credible prospects.
In Egypt, he says, high living costs and limited opportunities make risky migration attractive to young people. Arresting smugglers may interrupt routes temporarily, but without development, protection and a realistic future at home, demand for those routes persists.
Billions for partnership, questions over protection
On 17 March 2024, the EU and Egypt announced a strategic partnership supported by a €7.4 billion financial and investment package for 2024–2027. The package combines different instruments; it is not €7.4 billion in migration grants or an amount already paid in full.
The announced structure included up to €5 billion in macro-financial assistance, €1.8 billion in investment support and €600 million in grants, of which €200 million was for migration management. Cooperation also covers economic stability, trade, security and human development.
Humanitarian assistance for refugees and people fleeing Sudan is a separate strand of European support. It should not be conflated with border-control funding or treated as proof that the entire partnership is dedicated to preventing departures.
In November 2024, the EU also approved a €20 million European Peace Facility assistance measure for the Egyptian armed forces. Its stated purpose included strengthening capacities for territorial control and responding to security threats, particularly in the west, alongside civilian protection. Approval of a measure is not the same as confirmation that all funds have already been disbursed.
European policy documents describe cooperation against organised crime, migrant smuggling and trafficking, and efforts to improve operational coordination between border authorities. Rights organisations and researchers question whether the funding comes with safeguards strong enough to prevent abuse.
Their concern is that arrangements framed as migration management can strengthen coercive institutions while leaving the economic and political reasons people migrate untouched. The five Egyptians flown from Albania to Cairo illustrate the human stakes of that debate: how to ensure that an individual’s rights remain visible when governments move responsibility across borders.
