You are currently viewing From Albania to Europe: abolish migrant detention centres

From Albania to Europe: abolish migrant detention centres

Network Against Migrant Detention’s Statement for the mobilization scheduled on the 1st-2nd/November in Albania.

The arrival in Albania is scheduled for the 31st of October. The 1st of November, in the morning there will be a press conference in Shëngjin and in the afternoon a demonstration towards the Gjadër’s detention center (CPR). The 2nd of November is programmed a transnational assembly in Tirana. Below the article, there are logistic information to participate in the mobilization.

On November 1–2, we will return to Albania on the anniversary of the Rama–Meloni agreement, which allows Italy to build and manage migrant detention centres (CPRs) on Albanian soil. These centres are not only unconstitutional: they represent a colonial project, a dangerous precedent that Europe aims to replicate with the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Albania is being turned into a laboratory of externalisation, where carceral practices and deportation policies are tested—practices we see emerging everywhere.

From the US to North Africa, from Europe to Rwanda, images of deportations, pushbacks, and illegal migrant detention are multiplying, while far-right governments around the world fuel a security rhetoric based on closed borders, forced returns, and mass deportations. Administrative detention is consolidating as a central pillar of this repressive model, built on confinement, expulsion, and the systematic denial of rights.

Across Europe, the border regime is undergoing a profound restructuring. Driven by increasingly authoritarian and securitarian political agendas, the EU migration system is moving toward rapid, externalised, and highly militarised management. The legal framework enabling this transformation is the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which dangerously accelerates border procedures and normalizes detention as a routine tool to govern mobility.

Alongside this, the EU and individual member states are experimenting with so-called “innovative solutions.” The Return Directive, the Return Hubs, and the Safe Country Lists all pursue the same goal: making people increasingly deportable, invisible, and detainable. Together, these tools dismantle an already fragile right to asylum, forcing migrants into even deeper precarity—excluded from welfare and public services, and more easily exploited by markets that continue to demand cheap, disposable labour.

And yet, despite repression, forms of resistance emerge daily inside detention centres across Europe: hunger strikes, refusal of identification, mutual solidarity, public denunciations of systemic violence. These struggles prove that CPRs are not spaces of total control, but sites of conflict. The fight for freedom of movement and migrant self-determination stands as a crucial barrier against the growing militarisation of a global civil war that today manifests itself in genocides, indiscriminate aerial bombings, militarised borders, mass raids, and large-scale deportations.

In this global context, it is more urgent than ever to connect territorial struggles against administrative detention. We must strengthen a transnational and European perspective that goes beyond local and national mobilisations: a perspective capable of sharing practices, building networks, coordinating strategies to abolish the European and global regime of apartheid and confinement.

This is why we have chosen to unite—together with Albanian, Italian, European, and transnational comrades—in a decolonial and solidaristic struggle: to tell the Albanian people they are not alone, that resistance is possible, that protest must grow even where a culture of resistance has been systematically repressed. What is at stake is not only Albania, but the future of Europe as a whole. From here must begin a process of radical democratisation of the European and Mediterranean space in which we live.

Organize your TRIP to Tirana now

Fill out the FORM to confirm your participation.

Join the ONLINE TRANSNATIONAL ASSEMBLY on 30/9 to connect and build this mobilization together
Link per partecipare: https://meet.goto.com/655398597
Codice di accesso: 655-398-597

For info contact @networkagainstmigrantdetention, @meshde.al or againstmigrantdetention@gmail.com