On 9 May, Italy carried out its first direct deportation of five Egyptian migrants from a detention centre in Gjader, Albania, to Cairo. The step came under a controversial agreement between Italy and Albania to process asylum applications outside Italian borders, which has raised questions about its legality and its humanitarian consequences. In addition, the incident comes in the context of escalating strict European policies to curb irregular migration, led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who classifies Egypt as a “safe” country in order to facilitate deportation.
A chartered plane transported five Egyptian migrants from a detention centre in Gjader, Albania, to Cairo, with the plane stopping in Tirana for an hour and a half. The operation cost EUR 113,850, funded through a tender announced by the Italian Ministry of the Interior. Until now, the authorities have not disclosed the names or ages of those deported, while rights reports indicate that the deportation came as part of Italy’s strategy to curb the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean, as Egypt is classified as a “safe” country under bilateral agreements, which facilitates deportation without the need for complex asylum procedures. Nevertheless, the operation faced wide legal and rights criticism: Italian member of parliament Rachele Scarpa described the deportation as “illegitimate”, noting that it violates the European return directives and Italy’s constitution.
Nour Khalil, executive director of the Refugees Platform in Egypt, tells Zawia3 that the deportations to which Egyptians are subjected from Italy or other European countries have come to take multiple and complex forms, all aimed at circumventing international laws and depriving people of their basic rights, foremost among them the right to asylum. He explains that there are several types of deportation operations currently under way, the most prominent being those linked to the agreement between Italy and Albania, which provides for the establishment of detention centres for migrants on Albanian territory. These are marketed in the media as “reception centres”, while in reality they are closed prisons deprived of the most basic human rights standards.
Khalil points out that these people are detained in Albania even though European law stipulates that asylum applications must be processed within the territory of the European Union, and Albania is not a country of asylum under international conventions, specifically the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. He adds: “The Italian judiciary has issued several rulings confirming the unconstitutionality of this agreement with Albania and has ordered the return of the groups that were transferred there. Despite that, the Italian government continues to implement these measures that violate European and international law, and even forcibly transfers refugees and migrants to these centres, which are no different from prisons in terms of harsh conditions, the prevention of contact with the outside world, and depriving people of opportunities to speak with a lawyer or prepare their files to prove their need for international protection.
Over the past years, irregular migration from Egypt towards Italy has seen a notable rise, driven by successive economic and political crises. In 2022, the number of Egyptians who crossed the Mediterranean to Italy reached about 20,000 people, making them the non-European nationality that appeared most in official statistics. This rise is mainly due to the worsening of domestic crises, from the decline in the value of the pound to the rise in the unemployment rate. According to the Frontex agency, Egyptians made up about 7% of total arrivals in Italy via the central sea route in 2023, placing them among the top five nationalities on this route, and their ranking rose to fourth place during the first two months of 2024.
The matter is not limited to adults alone: large numbers of unaccompanied minors were recorded, amounting to 638 cases in April 2016 alone compared with 18 cases in the same period of 2015, reflecting a serious escalation in minors leaving on their own. Despite security efforts to prevent boats from departing from the Egyptian coast since 2016, migrants head to Libya as a main departure point, used to cross the sea towards Italy via complex smuggling routes.
Blackout and Circumvention of the Law
The director of the Refugees Platform reveals in his conversation with us that the five Egyptians recently deported from Albania to Egypt had been held in those centres illegally from the start, and that their return to Egypt took place in complete secrecy, without any official announcement from either the Italian or the Egyptian side. He notes that Italy allocated a plane at a cost of EUR 130,000 to carry out the deportation, which confirms the extent of the blackout and the large spending to implement these policies.
Khalil explains that deportation is not limited to Egyptians but includes other nationalities such as Tunisians, within a broader European trend aimed at curbing migration and depriving individuals of seeking asylum, whether through offshore processing centres or through lists called “safe country lists”. He continues: “Italy and the European countries are trying to circumvent international law by inventing the concept of safe countries, which is an illegal concept, because international law requires that each asylum application be examined individually, since the danger differs from one person to another, even within the same country. What may be safe for an adult man may not be safe for a woman, or for people from religious or ethnic minorities, or for holders of dissenting opinions.
He goes on: “In cases such as Syria during the war, or Sudan currently because of the conflicts and the genocide in Darfur, states adopted the concept of ‘prima facie’, or the prima facie definition of a refugee, which is the collective recognition of people’s right to protection without going into the precise details of each case, given the severity and danger of the situation in their regions”.
On the contrary, according to Khalil, European governments are trying to exploit this concept to impose lists of safe countries collectively, a measure that violates international law and aims to reduce the number of refugees accepted, especially from countries such as Egypt, which has become one of the top countries from which irregular migrants have arrived in Europe in recent years.
Cross-Border Violations
Khalil notes that the Italian government follows several means to speed up deportation procedures, including what is called offshore processing in centres outside Italy, and accelerated procedures within Italian territory, which do not give a person enough time to gather evidence or obtain real legal assistance. This leads to the rejection of most asylum applications from Egyptians, as fewer than 5% of the applications submitted over the past three years have been accepted.
Khalil points out that Egypt is also implicated in this file, as the vast majority of deportees are subjected to serious violations upon their return, beginning with being charged in smuggling cases, even if they have previously served sentences in Europe linked to the same charges, in addition to being subjected to the phenomenon of “recycling”, that is, being thrown into new cases on the same charges to ensure their continued detention. He explains that the Egyptian authorities use the high numbers of migrant arrests as an indicator to promote the efficiency of their security agencies before funding bodies, whether the European Union or others, even though most of those arrested are not actual smugglers but migrants, some of whom were forced to steer the boats in exchange for being exempted from paying the cost of the journey.
He adds: “In Italy, for example, there are Egyptians who spent six years in prison on smuggling charges, and after their sentences ended they were held in notorious deportation centres such as the ‘CPR’, and were pressured to sign voluntary return papers despite not wishing to do so, only to find themselves, after deportation, charged again in the same cases in Egypt and recycled into different cases on the same charges.”
He points out that there are Egyptians who received prison sentences amounting to thousands of years, in trials he described as lacking the most basic standards of justice, as Egyptians on board the boats are targeted in a racist manner and interrogated merely because of their nationality, amid the absence of interpretation or effective legal defence. He stresses that some trials in Greece, for example, last no more than 35 minutes and end with harsh sentences that may reach 2000 or even 4000 years in prison.
He continues: “The European agreements being promoted with Egypt, especially those related to making it a ‘hub’ country, that is, a centre for returning irregular migrants, whether Egyptians or of other nationalities, bring to mind the Albanian model that Italy applies, which entrenches widespread violations against these people”. He notes that Egypt, according to United Nations reports, witnesses systematic violations in detention centres and police stations, including torture and cruel treatment, which makes deporting anyone there from European countries a flagrant violation of international laws, especially the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture.
European Union documents point to Egyptians as among the most prominent non-European nationalities involved in human trafficking networks, which opened the door to wide-ranging investigations, accusations and detentions, especially in countries such as Italy and Greece. However, rights organisations stress that these prosecutions are often malicious in nature and lack evidence, as was evident in the “Pylos 9” case, in which nine Egyptians were imprisoned in Greece even though the Greek authorities had evidence of their innocence.
Regarding returns at sea, Khalil says that statements by the Egyptian army confirm, for the first time, the carrying out of forced returns from the Mediterranean, especially of Egyptians, who are charged in smuggling cases immediately upon their return, even if they had been subjected to drowning or injuries. He also reveals cases of enforced disappearance of non-Egyptian migrants, among them Syrians and Pakistanis, who were returned to Egypt and about whose fate no information has been available until now. He stresses: “What is happening is a crime complete in all its elements, which begins at sea and does not end with deportation, but continues with widespread violations in the countries of arrival, foremost among them Egypt, and all we have now is to expose these policies and reveal their details to public opinion”.
The Problem of Safe Countries
For his part, Karim Ennarah, director of research at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), says that safe country lists are a problematic policy and in essence constitute a violation of the Refugee Convention, because they inaccurately assume that an entire country is free of risk, whereas the international and national laws regulating the asylum process are built on the concept that seeking the shelter of another country’s protection, and the concept of fear of being subjected to persecution, are fundamentally individual concepts, not necessarily linked (or in all cases) to the existence of civil wars and wide-scale conflicts. Indeed, this latter expansion of the definition of a refugee to include those fleeing conflicts and wars is fundamentally an African or Southern expansion, introduced by the Convention of the Organisation of African Unity (Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa) in 1969.
He adds in his conversation with us: “Theoretically, classifying certain countries as safe countries is supposed not necessarily to mean that any asylum applications from those countries will be rejected automatically, only that they will be subject to faster examination, because most applications submitted by citizens of those countries will not pass, or so the European policymaker claims. The accelerated examination in this case eases the burden on the asylum system, as they put it. But in practice, this classification creates a prior bias among immigration, asylum and court officials in Europe and negatively affects the integrity of decisions on protection applications, as it implicitly assumes that those coming from these countries do not need protection. But international asylum law and the national laws in the European Union explicitly stipulate that entitlement to protection or otherwise must be based on an individual assessment of each case, and no asylum seeker may be returned to their country except after all legal avenues have been exhausted. The attempt to create a mechanism to ‘get rid’ quickly, in part, of this legal burden is a clear violation of international laws and of those countries’ national laws and constitutions. “
Ennarah says: “These changes to the international protection system, which since the mid-twentieth century has rested on the 1951 Geneva Convention for the protection of refugees, can only be understood in light of the rise of policies hostile to migration and migrants in Europe, especially with the rise of the far right, which sees migrants and refugees as an easy goal for scoring political points. European governments, and especially those belonging to the rising right, such as the Meloni government, resort to all means and legal tricks to reduce the number of refugees in those countries. He stresses that the new European policies seek to export the refugee crisis to countries outside the European Union, which he described as an attempt “to get rid of burdens at the expense of countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Jordan, which already bear many times what European countries bear in terms of refugee numbers. Part of that policy is luring neighbouring countries such as Albania and Turkey with money and bilateral agreements in exchange for absorbing refugees, even temporarily, until their applications are decided, which leads to further abuses against the citizens of those countries”.
The researcher points out that the Italian-Albanian agreement is still under consideration before the Italian Constitutional Court, and there is a possibility that it will be annulled if the court decides that it violates the Italian constitution and the country’s international obligations, also noting the possibility of challenging it before the European Court of Human Rights.
High Waves of Migration
Figures issued by international and European organisations reflect a continuous rise in the number of irregular migrants coming from Egypt, which contradicts official statements asserting the success of government efforts in eliminating the crisis. In 2022, the number of Egyptians who crossed the Mediterranean to Europe illegally reached more than 21,700 migrants, which placed Egypt among the list of the ten highest countries exporting irregular migrants, according to the European agency Frontex and data issued by the Italian Ministry of the Interior.
On the other hand, the Egyptian government says it has eliminated the phenomenon. Last April, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Migration, Dr. Badr Abdelatty, affirmed that the country had succeeded in putting an end to the phenomenon of illegal migration from its coasts, noting that the state did not stop there but opened its doors to receive those fleeing crises and wars in search of safety. In a joint statement by Minister of Planning Rania Al-Mashat during the round of dialogue with the European Commission, the government noted that Egypt had succeeded in stopping the departure of any illegal migration boats from its coasts for nearly eight years, while continuing to implement programmes to raise awareness among young people and promote “safe migration”.
Reports confirm that Libyan territory is the preferred route for Egyptian migrants seeking to reach Europe, particularly towards the Italian coast. In the first half of 2022 alone, about 3,935 arrivals of Egyptians in Italy were recorded, most of them through illegal migration from the Libyan coast, and Frontex reported that more than 90% of illegal crossing attempts by Egyptians during that period took place via the “Central Mediterranean route”, which reveals the existence of organised smuggling networks active on Egypt’s western border.
By 2023, the pace of illegal migration from Egypt had not declined but increased, as estimates indicated that about 22,000 Egyptian migrants entered Europe by illegal means during the year, which put Egypt at the top of the countries exporting illegal migrants, ahead of countries witnessing wars such as Syria and Afghanistan. In 2024, Egypt came second globally in terms of the number of irregular migrants to Europe, despite the intensive security measures and deterrent laws the state adopted in cooperation with the European Union, such as the Law on Combating Illegal Migration issued in 2016.
Dr. Karim El-Omda, professor of political economy, considered that irregular migration has become a widespread phenomenon on the African continent, and that its causes are not limited to economic factors alone but overlap with other crises such as wars, political conflicts and persecution of various kinds, which drives thousands to risk their lives on illegal migration routes in search of a better reality.
In earlier remarks to “Zawia3”, El-Omda explained that the economic situation in Egypt does not bode well for near-term solutions that would ease the suffering of young people, noting that limited opportunities and the high cost of living push many to consider migration as a standing option, even if it is fraught with risks. International studies have shown that Egyptians make up a significant proportion of the migrants who cross the Mediterranean, particularly via the Libyan coast, which confirms that economic and social motives continue to feed this phenomenon.
El-Omda added that security solutions, despite being necessary, cannot be sufficient on their own. The authorities may achieve temporary progress when they pursue smuggling networks and bring those involved to justice, but those achievements remain of limited effect if the real causes of migration are not addressed, and the phenomenon returns to the forefront with any decline in security efforts. He stressed that the absence of comprehensive development, the lack of any future horizon for young people, along with the fragility of legal protection, are all factors that continue to feed the phenomenon of irregular migration. He believes that confronting this phenomenon requires an integrated vision that addresses the roots of the crises, instead of settling for temporary security treatments that have proven unable to eliminate it radically.
The relationship between Egypt and the European Union constitutes a main axis in managing the issue of irregular migration across the Mediterranean. On 17 March 2024, the European Union announced an agreement with Egypt that includes the provision of a large financial aid package worth EUR 7.4 billion. This package is part of a broader European strategy aimed at strengthening cooperation with the countries of the southern Mediterranean on migration and asylum files, in parallel with supporting security and economic stability in the region. This agreement came as the culmination of a series of external partnership agreements that the European Commission hastened to sign from late 2023 until March 2024, most of them focused on Mediterranean countries, foremost among them Egypt, as a main transit point on irregular migration routes towards Europe.
In the same context, the European Union provided Egypt during 2024 with additional humanitarian aid worth EUR 9 million directed to refugees and asylum seekers on its territory, in addition to allocating another EUR 20 million to support the reception of displaced people fleeing the ongoing war in Sudan, especially in light of the repercussions of this war on the increase in irregular migration through Egypt towards the European coast.
On the other hand, European aid included programmes and projects aimed at strengthening the capabilities of the Egyptian border guard, and in November 2024 the Egyptian armed forces received an additional EUR 20 million within the framework of what is known as the “European Peace Facility”, a European fund allocated to supporting security and military operations in neighbouring countries. According to European Union documents, these funds aim to strengthen the Egyptian army’s capabilities in protecting national security and achieving internal stability, with a focus on improving the protection of civilians in the country.
European Union documents also indicate that the main purpose of these partnerships with Egypt and other North African countries is to strengthen border security through cross-border cooperation, especially in confronting organised crime groups, including migrant smuggling and human trafficking networks. The European side also specifies that the immediate interim goal is to establish effective operational cooperation between the border management authorities in the countries concerned.
Nevertheless, rights reports and wide criticism indicate that previous agreements concluded by the European Union with Egypt and other countries in the region, under names such as “combating smuggling” or “migration governance and border control”, have not actually contributed to reducing irregular migration. On the contrary, observers believe that these policies deepen the causes of migration, increase its risks and lead to entrenching the power of authoritarian regimes in the region, without substantively addressing the political and economic causes that drive people to flee their countries.
Finally… recent European policies, particularly the agreement between Italy and Albania, reflect an accelerating trend towards militarising the migration file and dealing with it in isolation from the humanitarian and legal dimension, which opens the door to further cross-border abuses, beginning with harsh detention centres, passing through secret deportation operations, and not ending with restricting the rights of asylum seekers in Europe or punishing them upon their return to their countries, as in the case of Egypt. While Europe continues to classify countries such as Egypt as “safe countries” to justify deportation, daily events reveal systematic violations practised against deportees, amid the absence of any real treatment of the causes of migration, such as poverty, unemployment, the absence of development and the deterioration of the rights situation. In this landscape, the prospects of escape by sea remain open, and migrants remain victims of contradictory policies that feed the crisis instead of containing it.
Editorial correction: The first version of the report stated that the Law on Combating Illegal Migration was issued in 2020; the correct date is 2016, and it is Law No. 82 of 2016 on Combating Illegal Migration and the Smuggling of Migrants.
