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Italy sent its first boat carrying migrants to Albania on Monday, part of a plan to send migrants who are rescued in the Mediterranean by Italian ships to detention centers in the Balkan nation, where their asylum claims will be assessed.
The plan, which is being heralded by the Italian government and some European Union leaders as an innovative model to manage and deter immigration to Italy, has been criticized by human rights officials and groups, who fear it would put the migrants at risk and expose them to rights violations.
The centers, in the Albanian towns of Schengjin and Gjader, started operating last week.
Francesco Kamel, a spokesman for Italy’s interior ministry, said 16 men, from Egypt and Bangladesh, had been picked up in international waters and are expected to arrive in Albania Wednesday morning.
The Italian government has said only “non-vulnerable” men coming from “safe countries” would be taken to the centers in Albania. Children, pregnant women and others labeled “vulnerable” — including the ill and disabled — would not go to the centers but would be taken directly to Italy for processing.
Once in Albania, the migrants would be allowed to register for asylum and could plead their cases remotely to Italian judges, then await responses to the applications. Such asylum cases can often take months, but Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, said last week that they expected the cases to be resolved in just days.
If the asylum claims are rejected, the migrants would be directly expelled by Albania to their home countries.
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has called the program a “model of cooperation between E.U. and non-E.U. countries in managing migration flows.” Albania is not a member of the European Union but is being considered for membership.
But critics have said the plan would be a dangerous “externalization” of national borders. When the plan was announced, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, warned that such “measures significantly increase the risk of exposing refugees, asylum seekers and migrants to human rights violations.”
The leader of Italy’s opposition Democratic Party, Elly Schlein, accused the government on Monday of squandering public money to build the migrant centers in Albania.
But the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, has endorsed the plan, calling it “an example of out-of-the-box thinking, based on fair sharing of responsibilities with third countries.”
Mr. Piantedosi said last week that he expects the program to become a deterrent for migrants seeking to enter Italy.
The deal with Albania is similar to one that the British government has sought in which it planned to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda before their claims could assessed in Britain. British courts have blocked the proposal’s implementation.
Ms. Meloni said that she and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, had discussed the Albania plan during his recent visit to Italy, and that the British government has shown “great attention” to it.
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.
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