When Keir Starmer scrapped the Tories’ disastrous Rwanda deportations deal within days of assuming office, there was a sigh of relief. Many welcomed what seemed a decisive shift away from the previous government’s strategy of using relentless cruelty toward people migrating to distract from their failures to govern.
Some even hoped that Labour’s campaign–which featured a defecting hard-right Conservative MP arguing that the Tories were insufficiently tough on borders–was merely a clever electoral manoeuvre. But as the Labour government ramps up mass deportations and raids on workplaces, reopens abuse-ridden detention centres, and mulls returning the UK back to the fold of a deadly European migration control regime, it looks like Starmer’s campaign should be taken at its word.
This week, the prime minister is in Italy breaking bread with Giorgia Meloni, a leader who came to power at the head of a party built in the aftermath of the Second World War to maintain the legacy of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. Starmer says he wants to learn from and cooperate with Meloni’s approach to migration.
This comes as Italy and Albania sign an agreement including the construction of detention centres on Albanian territory, where third-country nationals rescued in the Mediterranean Sea would be taken for extraterritorial processing of their asylum applications and potentially for expulsion. Meloni hailed the protocol as a ‘historic agreement for the entire EU’.
Human rights organisations warn that the arbitrary detention legitimised by the agreement could lead to potential human rights violations, particularly regarding legal defence and asylum rights. Hearings on asylum applications will be held remotely, and Italian authorities with overstretched staff will be tasked with processing applications coming from Albania in just 28 days, further limiting due process.
On a visit to the centres in Albania this week, we saw the rapid construction of a seven-metre-high wall fencing off the detention camps, which, according to guards patrolling the sites, ‘will guarantee that no migrant locked up there can escape’.
The Albania deal is the latest in a series of Italian moves which have worsened the already dire situation in the central Mediterranean, the world’s deadliest migration route. Meloni came to office promising a ‘naval blockade’ against migrants. Last year, one of us was on a civil sea rescue ship that was detained and fined for the supposed crime of saving too many lives.
Italy routinely uses arbitrary detainment, the assigning of distant ports of safety, bureaucratic harassment, or outright arrests, to prevent people from saving lives at sea. The rhetoric about clamping down on smuggling gangs seems simple. But in reality, people seeking safety, people providing aid, and people providing basic services, are routinely criminalised as smugglers.
The case of Ibrahima Bah, a teenager from Senegal who was convicted of ‘illegal’ entry into the UK and manslaughter, reminds us of the consequences of criminalising people migrating as smugglers. Bah was arrested in December 2022 and, later on, sentenced to nine years by British authorities for driving a boat across the Channel.
The tragic collapse of the boat resulted in the death of four people. Under the scarcity of accessible and legal routes, Ibrahima was forced to steer the boat in exchange for free passage for himself and his brother. Such cases are routine in Italy.
It gets worse. Starmer and Lammy have also signalled that they will look to European arrangements with Libya and Syria for inspiration.
Outsourcing Violence
For years, Italy, along with France and the EU, have poured money into the so-called ‘Libyan Coast Guard’, a force which regularly abuses and even shoots at people crossing the Mediterranean, and drags them back to detention in Libya.
In Libya’s infamous detention centres, violence, torture, and slavery is rife. Many detainees find themselves locked up in the centres after being intercepted and pulled back in their desperate attempts to cross to Europe. Harrowing accounts refer to overcrowding in unventilated rooms where food is slid under the locked doors, routine beatings, and regular disease outbreaks due to unsanitary conditions.
Far from the rhetoric about ‘smashing gangs’, European funding has ended up in the hands of militias deeply involved in smuggling, who are handed the positions of boats in distress by Frontex, the EU’s border agency. European funding was also found earlier this year to be complicit in policing operations where thousands of mainly Black people migrating are rounded up and dumped in harsh deserts in North Africa, often left for dead.
Syria remains a profoundly unsafe place for people to return to, despite attempts of some EU states to ‘carve out’ safe areas within Syria where refugees could be returned. A recent report on Syria issued by the UN Commission of Inquiry has flagged the escalating humanitarian crises along several areas in Syria ravaged by intensifying wars. The report concluded that the country remains unsafe, and the so-called ‘safe zones’ are fundamentally flawed and inhumane.
When the Labour government cancelled the Rwanda plan, they correctly pointed out that it was cruel and unworkable. Outsourcing border violence to other countries does not prevent people from migrating, it only causes misery and suffering for people on the move. It siphons much-needed public funding into the hands of unscrupulous governments and for-profit corporations who provide weapons, walls, and surveillance to maintain the machinery.
There is a tragic irony in Starmer’s Italy visit also involving the announcement of a £485 million UK investment from Leonardo, an arms firm involved both in the sale of weapons to conflict zones where people are displaced, and building the militarised borders that confront people fleeing.
The narrative of ‘migration crises’ obscures the complicity of powerful countries such as Italy and the UK in fuelling displacement through economic and foreign policy. And it degrades the human rights frameworks that protect us all.
A prime minister who has made much of his background as a human rights lawyer should understand this. We are living through an unprecedented rollback of rights, values, and standards, of which migration is only one example.
The promise of social democrats and liberals was that they would restore decency to politics, not take policy tips from far-right governments. Rather than repeating the previous government’s strategy of migrant-baiting and brutality–which was a factor in mobs attempting to burn down people seeking asylum only weeks ago–Keir Starmer should use his majority to chart a different course: one that meets our obligations to protect, rather than harm, people seeking safety and does not attempt to divide us by where we were born.
On his return from Italy, the prime minister should focus closer to home; on addressing the needs of people and public services suffering from years of austerity and mismanagement, and building the fairer and more decent Britain he promised.
Nathan Akehurst is a researcher and campaigner on border violence in Europe, and a civil search and rescue volunteer.
Kristina Millona is a researcher and investigative journalist based in Tirana, Albania working on topics around Albanian migration, border violence and racial capitalism.