Investigation into Italy's Albania migrant centres wins European Parliament journalism prize

The award

The European Parliament's Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism for 2026 was awarded on Wednesday, 21 October, to an investigation into the agreement under which Italy built a detention centre and an asylum processing centre on Albanian territory. The reporters are Giacomo Zandonini of Italy and Maite Vermeulen of the Netherlands, and the piece was published on the Dutch platform De Correspondent. A representative of an independent jury, made up of journalists from all EU member states, handed over the prize at a ceremony in the Daphne Caruana Galizia press room of the Parliament in Strasbourg. Parliament President Roberta Metsola and Vice-President Pina Picierno, who is responsible for the prize, attended the event.

How the field was narrowed

Between 4 May and 31 July 2026, hundreds of journalists from the 27 EU countries submitted their work. The jury selected ten finalists from 344 entries before choosing the winner.

What the investigation found

The authors spent more than 18 months examining how the agreement was designed to intercept people trying to enter Italy irregularly and move them to Albania, a non-EU country. There, their asylum claims were rejected under accelerated procedures and the people were sent back to their countries of origin. The investigation identifies 259 million euros in Italian public spending over the first two years of the programme, which held only 256 people. Occupancy stayed low because Italian courts repeatedly refused to validate detention, forcing migrants to be brought back to Italy. The original scheme covered men rescued at sea from countries Italy had classed as safe, mainly Bangladesh and Egypt, and judges challenged those classifications.

Key dates

The work began in October 2024, shortly after the first people were transferred to the centres, and the report was later published in January. Submissions to the prize opened on 4 May 2026 and closed on 31 July 2026, ahead of the award on 21 October 2026.

Access and transparency

The authors say they never obtained permission to enter the centres during more than a year of work. Requests to the Italian government, the interior ministry and the prefectures produced few answers, and some rejected requests were challenged in review. Documents from the Netherlands, including 70 items such as emails about meetings, assessments and exchanges on the Italy-Albania deal, proved more useful. Zandonini described the main difficulty in plain terms.

The biggest obstacle was gaining access to information.

Zandonini said the Italian side had been far less transparent about financial data and about the conditions and numbers of people held. The Italian and Albanian governments declined to comment on the data the authors collected.

Reactions

Vermeulen told ANSA that such arrangements with non-EU countries carry human rights risks, high costs and few results. She said creating facilities like these outside the EU has become almost standard practice among European governments, and noted that the Dutch government is negotiating with Rwanda. She hopes the prize and the investigation will serve as a warning to governments accelerating these deals. Italian MEP Cecilia Strada, of the Democratic Party, who visited the centres during seven days of visits over two years, called the award an important signal and said the investigation exposes what the government would rather keep from public view.

Parliament's statement

Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist, was killed in a car bomb attack in 2017 after exposing corruption, and the prize honours her work. In the statement issued by Parliament, Metsola made the point directly.

Those who wanted to silence her failed.