Italy is offshoring asylum. Spain is counting its dead. Germany has closed its doors. What Europe’s most ambitious migration law looks like on the ground.
On a Tuesday morning in late October 2024, the Spanish maritime rescue service guided a wooden boat into the port of Arguineguín, on the southern coast of Gran Canaria. Forty-one people climbed down onto the dock: men from Senegal and Mali, a family from Mauritania, two unaccompanied teenagers. They had been at sea for six days. All of them were alive — which, by the standards of that year, made them among the fortunate.
The International Organization for Migration had, by that point, recorded more than 700 deaths on the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands in the first nine months of 2024 alone. The real figure, for the boats that disappear without anyone watching, is unknowable.
That same week, 2,000 kilometres to the northeast, an Italian coast guard vessel was transferring a group of men — Egyptian and Bangladeshi nationals intercepted in international waters — to a detention facility in Albania. Under an agreement signed by Rome and Tirana the previous year, Italy had built two centres on Albanian soil to process the asylum claims of people rescued at sea. The government called it an innovative solution. Italian courts called it unlawful, and ordered the men returned.
These scenes played out against the same legislative backdrop: the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted by the European Parliament in April 2024. The most sweeping overhaul of European asylum law in two decades. Ten interconnected legislative acts. One stated goal: a common European approach to migration built on shared responsibility, faster procedures, and more secure borders. Three very different national realities.
Italy’s arrangement with Albania was the most visible early experiment in a concept that runs through the Pact’s logic: that asylum procedures can happen outside EU territory, reducing pressure on arrival countries and — critics argue — placing new barriers between people and the protection they are legally entitled to seek.
The legal obstacles appeared almost immediately. Italian magistrates ruled, repeatedly, that the countries on the EU’s approved ‘safe countries of origin’ lists did not meet the threshold required under EU law. Transfers were blocked. Human rights organisations reported that conditions at the Gjadër facility — a former military complex inland from the Albanian coast — were opaque and isolating, with detainees describing inadequate access to lawyers and medical attention. Reports of self-harm and suicide attempts at the centre circulated through legal networks monitoring the site.
By October 2025, after nearly a year of operation, the centres had processed a fraction of the numbers originally projected. Most of those transferred had been returned to Italy following court decisions. The Meloni government framed the arrangement as a precedent still being refined. Its critics saw it as a cautionary tale about offshoring accountability alongside people.
The deeper question the Albanian experiment raises is not legal but political: if the courts keep blocking offshore processing, will governments simply push to change the courts’ mandate? In Brussels, that debate has already begun.
Spain’s challenge is less legal and more elemental. The Canary Islands sit closer to the African coast than to mainland Europe, and the Atlantic route — partly a consequence of tightened controls in the Mediterranean — has become one of the busiest and deadliest crossings in the world.
Reception centres on the islands have operated at chronic overcapacity for years. People who arrive spend months in provisional accommodation before their cases are heard. Social workers describe facilities designed for hundreds housing thousands; children sharing rooms with adults they don’t know; people waiting so long for decisions that their legal status changes before the paperwork catches up.
The Spanish government has pushed other EU member states, repeatedly, to accept relocated asylum seekers under the Pact’s mandatory solidarity mechanism — a provision requiring countries to either take people in or contribute to a common fund. The mechanism does not fully apply until June 2026. Spain was one of the strongest advocates for that solidarity clause during negotiations. What it obtained was a framework that acknowledges the principle and defers its practice. In the meantime, the boats keep arriving.
In September 2024, Germany reinstated controls at all its land borders. The decision came after a stabbing in Solingen that reignited a national debate about migration and internal security. Neighbouring countries — Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic — filed formal diplomatic protests. The controls, described as temporary, remained in place well into 2025.
The move was both a political response to the growing strength of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and a symptom of a structural problem the Pact has not resolved: secondary movements. Germany has long been a common destination for people who entered the EU through another country and continued northward. The Dublin rules, which the Pact only partly reforms, still assign responsibility to the first country of arrival. Germany’s frustration with that logic predates this legislation and outlasts it.
The mandatory solidarity mechanism was designed to ease the burden on frontline states, reducing the pressure that pushes people to move onwards. Whether it will achieve this depends on the political will of 27 governments — a variable that no piece of legislation can control. Germany’s border closures, technically a breach of the Schengen agreement’s spirit, have so far gone unchallenged by the Commission.
The Pact enters full effect in June 2026. By then, every EU member state must have updated its national legislation, designated competent authorities, and built the administrative and physical infrastructure the system requires. How ready each country will be varies considerably — and the Commission’s own midterm report, published in June 2025, acknowledged that several states were behind schedule.
What the Pact cannot guarantee is what happens in the space between a law’s passage and its application. It cannot guarantee the cooperation of third countries whose borders Europe relies on to slow arrivals. It cannot guarantee the decisions of national courts interpreting its provisions. It cannot guarantee that 27 governments with 27 different electorates will absorb the same political costs of solidarity.
What it has established, for now, is that the conversation has a new legal frame. Whether that frame holds the weight it is meant to carry — in Arguineguín, in Gjadër, along Germany’s eastern checkpoints — is the question European migration policy has long deferred, and that the Pact, for all its ambition, has not yet answered.
