How to Become an Extraterritorial Detention Center
31. On 28 May 2004 the applicant, blindfolded and handcuffed, was led out of his cell and locked in what seemed to be a shipping container until he heard the sound of an aircraft arriving. On that occasion, he was handed the suitcase that had been taken from him in Skopje. He was told to change back into the clothes he had worn upon his arrival in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and was given two new T-shirts, one of which he put on. He was then taken to the waiting aircraft, wearing a blindfold and earmuffs, and was chained to his seat there. […]
32. When the aircraft landed, the applicant, still blindfolded, was placed in the back seat of a vehicle. He was not told where he was. He was driven in the vehicle up and down mountains, on paved and unpaved roads. The applicant was aware of men getting out of the car and then of men getting in. All of the men had Slavic-sounding accents, but said very little. Eventually, the vehicle was brought to a halt. He was taken from the car and his blindfold was removed. His captors gave him his belongings and passport, removed his handcuffs and directed him to walk down the path without turning back. It was dark and the road was deserted. He believed he would be shot in the back and left to die. He rounded a corner and came across three armed men. They immediately asked for his passport. They saw that his German passport had no visa in it and asked him why he was in Albania without legal permission. He replied that he had no idea where he was.
This harrowing account is an excerpt from the European Court of Human Rights 2012 judgment in the case El-Masri v. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which established that the US government had kidnapped, tortured, and raped a completely innocent German citizen on extraterrorial rendition sites during its disastrous and illegal War on Terror. The place he was shipped off to, once it dawned on his captors they had abused the wrong man, was the Albanian airbase of Kuçova,1 recently turned into official NATO aviation and drone base.
The abandonment of El-Masri in the Albanian mountains marks the beginning of Albania’s role as receptacle for the uncomfortable remainders of imperial warfare, a status that consecutive prime ministers have tried leverage on the international political scene, whether it be to secure friendship and protection from perceived allies such as the US, or to ingratiate themselves with European leaders to further the EU accession process.
Between 2014 and 2016, after pressure from the US, Albania became the host of around 3,000 members of the Mohedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a formerly armed Iranian Islamist–Marxist dissident group, whose status as “terrorists” has been fluid depending on the pervailing geopolitical winds. In 2003, during the Second Iraq War, the Iraqi base where they had been exiled to was bombed by the US-led Coalition forces. They were forced to surrender and subsequently became protected persons under the Geneva Convention. In the process, they turned, under US protection, into a ploy in its attempts to change the Iranian regime, which in turn led to increasing hostility of the Iraqi government and the necessity of their eventual evacuation to Albania.
In their camp, called Ashraf 3, the MEK frequently hosted US political hawks, including former FBI director Louis J. Freeh and Republican Senators John McCain, Thom Tillis, Roy Blunt, and John Cornyn, as well as former Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani calling for “regime change,” and former Vice President Mike Pence. This frequently led to tensions between the Albanian and Iranian government. Even though on Albanian sovereign territory, the MEK camp de facto fell outside Albanian jurisdiction, and the Albanian government turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses happening inside of it, all in the service of the “great plan” brewing within the Trump administration after its withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Things came to a head in 2018, when the Albanian government expelled the Iranian ambassador for unspecified security threats. In 2019, the government claimed to have uncovered an “Iranian terrorist network” in Albania, but failed to provide any further details or make any arrests. In return, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke in 2020 of Albania as “a small and very treacherous European country,” where “a number of Iranian mercenaries and traitors […] got together with some foreigners and tried to conspire against the Islamic republic.” Added to this was the suspected Iranian involvement in several cyberattacks on Albanian public and private institutions under the name “Homeland Justice,” which exposed massive amounts data including email communication from Prime Minister Edi Rama and other high functionaries within the government. After a particurly damaging cyberattack in July 2022, Albania cut all diplomatic ties with Iran.
That the current Biden government is less enthusiastic about the potential uses of a militarized Islamist–Marxist cult to take over the Islamic Republic of Iran is evidenced by the police raid last year of Camp Ashraf 3 at the order of the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) as part of an investigation into “unsanctioned political activities.” The raid resulted in the death of one of the MEK members, while around 100 were injured. Tellingly, US government considered the raid an internal Albanian affair.
Besides the MEK, there are two other groups of “collateral damage” of the War on Terror that have found permanent residence in Albania: Uyghur former detainees from Guantánamo Bay and Afghans working for the US during the military occupation of Afghanistan.
On May 5, 2006, five Uyghur former detainees, who had spent five years illegally incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, arrived in Albania, where they would be housed indefinitely without the possibility of leaving the country. As recently as 2021, Ayoub, one of the Uyghurs stated: “We don’t have permission to work here (in Albania). […] We’re unable to get passports, we’re not allowed to travel outside of Albania. We’ve been here for over 15 years.” For them, Albania has become a giant open-air prison, an ongoing gross violation of their human rights.
In August 2021, Albania welcomed another group of refugees, this time Afghans who had been forced to leave their country after the choatic pullout of the US occupying forces and subsequent victory of the Taliban regime. Different from the Uyghurs, who had formally requested asylum in Albania, the Afghan refugees eventually hosted in the town of Shëngjin had no such status. These were Afghans who during the military occupation has worked for the US government, military, media, or NGOs, and whose safety was in jeopardy under the new regime. They would be “temporarily” stationed in Albania while their US visa applications would be processed. As of 2023, despite protests, many were still in Shëngjin awaiting an unclear future.
The transformation of Albania into a de facto extraterritorial detention center is in full swing, becoming a no-man’s land where passports are indefinitely confiscated and bureaucratic procedures to transit “elsewhere” are indefinitely delayed, a rightless receptacle of those who were forced to flee wars not of their own making, who have no choice but to arrive here to secure their own and their family’s livelihoods.
Both former Prime Minister Sali Berisha and current Prime Minister Edi Rama have effectively used Albania’s historical reputation for hospitality in their respective gambits for attention and protection from subsequent US governments, whether Republican or Democratic. But Rama has now also turned this strategy to use with his EU counterparts.
Already in 2018, Rama tried to convince then Austrian Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz of his plan to host “reception centers” for illegal immigrants entering the EU, after the latter had proposed massive extraterritorial detention centers in Northern Africa. Rama would offer this service to the EU hoping, of course, that this would accelerate the opening of accession negotiations, which had been stymied, ironically, in part by the massive problem posed by illegal Albanian immigration into EU countries.
The Kurz plan was never implemented at the scale it was envisioned, but after Brexit the UK tried to implement a similar scheme with extraterritorial reception centers in Rwanda, which turned into a massive financial, political, and moral failure. Despite the UK’s cautionary tale, as well as the obvious human rights issues with Albania’s involvement in the reception/detention of the Uyghur, Afghan, and Iranian citizens, Rama has continued his campaign for extraterritorial detention centers in his own country, because he understands that this is one of the few ways to ingratiate himself with what otherwise would be his natural political opponents: extreme rightwing/fascist EU politicians.
With the Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, belonging to the “post-fascist” party Fratelli d’Italia, he has struck gold. Presiding over one of the main entrypoints of immigrants arriving from northern Africa and in desperate need to prove herself as a fresh-faced political hardliner, Meloni was more than happy to strike a deal with Rama. On November 6, 2023 they signed an agreement, called the “Migration Protocol,” to open two extraterritorial detention centers in Albania: one in the harbor town Shëngjin (disembarkation and reception) and one in Gjadër (pre-removal) close to the military airforce base, with a total maximum capacity of 3,000 people. The territory for both centers would fall under Italian jurisdiction without, however, being officially ceded to Italy.
All of this is in contravention of EU migration law, which prohibits the export of asylum seekers to third countries, as well as international law, as argued by Matteo De Bellis, Amnesty International’s Migration and Asylum Researcher:
Individuals disembarked in Albania and brought to the centres there, including refugees and asylum seekers, would be automatically detained and unable to leave the centres for up to 18 months. Under international law, automatic detention is inherently arbitrary and therefore unlawful.
Whereas the Italian parliament rapidly ratified the Protocol, in Albania it was appealed at the Constitutional Court by a group of opposition MPs on the basis of supposed procedural errors as well as multiple violations of human rights enshrined in the Albanian Constitution and international law.
The crux of the matter is of course the precise legal status of the territories on which the detention centers are to be built. If they are ceded to Italy, then they fall completely under Italian jurisdiction and Albania cannot intervene. If they remain under Albanian sovereignty, the Albanian constitution, with all rights enshrined in it, continues to prevail no matter what the agreement specifies. If the latter is the case, the contemporaneous imposition of both Albanian constitution and Italian immigration law on immigrants from third countries cannot but create unacceptable inequalities before the law.
The Protocol itself is clear on the issue of the sovereignty of the territory on which the detention centers (“zones”) are built:
Art. 3.1. The Albanian party grants the Italian party the right to use the zones, according to the conditions determined in this protocol.
Art. 4.2. The structures mentioned in point 1 [the centers] are managed by the Italian party, according to the pertinent Italian and European legislation. […]2
Furthermore, as the government itself makes clear in its argument to the Constitutional Court, “the Protocol for Migration doesn’t pertain to the territory or the sovereignty over it, but merely with transferring state property under the administration of the Italian authorities, which not doesn’t make it a transfer of state sovereignty” (§30). This argument was accepted by the Constitutional Court, while also making explicit that “there is no provision according to which the Albanian state explicitly withdraws from the exercise of jurisdiction over its territory” (§37). As a result, the Constitutional Court argues:
Even though the zones in the Migration Protocol will de facto be used by the Italian authorities to process, according to Italian legislation, the asylum requests of migrants aiming to enter Italy, this does not absolve the Albanian authorities from a positive duty vis-à-vis the migrants.3
In other words, despite the vague wording of the Protocol, the Albanian authorities will have legal responsibility over the migrants in the detention centers, a responsibility that if this scheme is realized, will no doubt be tested. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has already halted flights from the UK departing for Rwanda, and it is likely that a similar battle awaits the rendition of migrants from Italy to Albania. No doubt sensing the trouble in the air with this “double” Italian–Albanian jurisdiction, the Constitutional Court refused to request an opinion from the ECtHR (§63–64).
On January 29 the Constitutional Court voted in favor of the agreement with a minimal majority of 5–4, opening the way for ratification by Parliament, which indeed happened on February 22, in a record 10-minute session without any significant debate.
Irrespective of the future legal headaches, Rama has been able to claim the Migration Protocol as an act of hospitality, “an honor for Albania to prove useful to Italy,” “where hundreds of thousands of Albanians live, work, have children, and where hundreds of thousands go every year for business, study, or simply to breathe the air of home in Europe.”
Rama has been playing this double-faced game skillfully for the last few years. On the one hand, he postures as one of the last remaining Third-Way social democrats, as was on full display recently at the so-called Dubai Leadership Summit, where he was “interviewed” by multimillionaire and genocidal autocrat-whisperer Tony Blair. On the other, he snuggles up to fascism-adjacent rightwingers like Kurtz and Meloni, generously offering to take these pesky asylum seekers off their hands as “compensation” for all the Albanian emigration, and in exchange for their support in Albania’s EU accession.
To conclude, a word of caution here would be appropriate. Unlike many other European countries, Albania has experienced little of the recent waves of immigration caused by imperial warfare in Africa and the Middle East, warfare which has thickly lined the coffers of the Western military–industrial complex and has driven millions of innocent people away from their homes and livelihoods. The lack of any visible migration into the country, except for Italian pensioners and a stray Western émigré like yours truly, combined with the justified Albanian pride in its tradition of hospitality, has made Albania an unlikely breeding ground for the xenophobic and fascist mass rhetoric on full display in nearly all other European countries. This is a blessing.
At the same time, we should not underestimate how quickly a population deprived of basic services, suffering under massive corruption and a largely dysfunctional state apparatus, will turn to the false promise of racist and supremacist rhetorics. During a protest in Lezhë against the detention centers, adults and children were carrying signs such as “Don’t bring me Africa, bring me Europe,” “Once upon a time princes gathered here, now it’s migrants,” and “I decided who’s a guest in my house, not Edi Rama.”
While these slogans are not even close to the vile rhetoric that is currently heard in parliaments all over the continent, they are an indication of a simmering resentment. It requires only a single media-savvy upstart with a little more political acumen than the current oppositional hotchpotch realizing that nationalism-infused resentment against “the other” or “the elites” (often conflated) may work as well in Albania as it does in the rest Europe. Once that genie is out of the bottle, this country will experience a whole new level of misery.
The Albanian Mechanism is part of Manifesto GREAT WAVE.
See Dick Marty, “Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report,” Doc. 11302 rev., June 11, 2007, §279: “Today I think I am in a position to reconstruct the circumstances of Mr El-Masri's return from Afghanistan: he was flown out of Kabul on 28 May 2004 on board a CIA-chartered Gulfstream aircraft with the tail number N982RK to a military airbase in Albania called Bezat-Kuçova Aerodrome.”
My emphases.
My emphasis.