Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said Yerevan was never approached about hosting a European Union-funded center for migrants awaiting deportation, after Italian media named Armenia as one of 11 places where such centers could go, in a plan Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi brought to EU interior ministers on Tuesday.
“We have not received such a proposal, and no such issue has been discussed with us,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ani Badalyan told Armenpress. Asked on Tuesday by RFE/RL’s Armenian Service whether Rome had discussed the matter with Yerevan, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said the ministry was not aware of the information and declined further comment.
Euronews reported on Monday that Italy wants the EU to build return centers for migrants who enter the bloc illegally, and placed Armenia on a preliminary list of possible locations. The list named Ghana, Senegal, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Egypt, Uganda, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Montenegro. Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest daily newspaper, published the same list with Rwanda added.
Neither Euronews nor Corriere della Sera reported that Rome had approached Yerevan. The proposal is addressed to the EU, and Armenia appears in it as a name on an internal candidate list.
No country on the list has agreed to host anything, and neither Brussels nor Rome has confirmed Armenia’s presence on it. Uganda is the option Rome considers most concrete, with Germany, Austria and the Netherlands already interested in projects there. Armenia is not a country of origin or transit on the routes the plan addresses.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni first put the idea forward at the end of June, after the EU approved its new regulation on returns. Ministers convened Tuesday over last week’s mass crossing into Ceuta, the Spanish exclave on Morocco’s coast. Estimates of that crossing range from more than 50,000 to around 70,000 people, and more than 48,000 returned to Morocco within 48 hours. At least 88 people died, Spanish officials said Monday, after 72 bodies were recovered by Sunday. Morocco’s interior ministry gave a far lower figure of 11.
They met in an informal video conference of home affairs officials from the 27 member states. It was not a European Council meeting, and no heads of government took part.
Piantedosi put the proposal to his counterparts there. No list of countries appears in the transcript released by his office, and Armenia went unmentioned in every account of the meeting.
“Now the time has come to put into practice new hub models for the external processing of asylum procedures and for returns in safe third countries,” Piantedosi told the meeting, according to Reuters. He said that if a third country refuses to cooperate on readmitting its own citizens, the union must be able to apply strict conditions across all sectors, using all the levers at its disposal. Under the plan, migrants who reach EU territory without authorization would be held outside the bloc while their asylum and immigration files are examined, with the centers financed through the EU.
Ministers commended Spain for its response and noted there had been no onward movement to mainland Spain or other member states. EU Home Affairs Commissioner Magnus Brunner said afterward that the crisis was resolved and the integrity of the Schengen area had been preserved.
A closing statement recorded consensus on strengthening return mechanisms and building partnerships with third countries. Ministers named no host country and approved no center. No follow-up meeting has been announced.
