Richard Gere and ActionAid criticise Italy-Albania migration deal as Matteo Salvini fires back

Gere and ActionAid challenge offshore migration policy

American actor Richard Gere joined humanitarian organisation ActionAid on 5 October 2026 to release a video appeal criticising contemporary European and Italian migration controls. In the campaign, Gere warned that public discourse is increasingly replacing compassion with fear, reducing people fleeing hardship to numbers, problems, or security threats. He emphasised that people fleeing their home countries do so in search of dignity and safety, noting that all individuals share fundamental human rights. Gere specifically focused on the growing reliance on detention, deportations, and the externalisation of border management beyond European borders.

Migration can be managed without inhumane conditions, without weakening the right to seek asylum and without treating human rights as obstacles.

ActionAid report reviews Italian detention centres

The video appeal accompanied the publication of the report "Trattenuti", produced by ActionAid in partnership with the University of Bari, examining costs, human rights conditions, and deportation procedures inside Italy's Centri di permanenza per il rimpatrio (CPR). The study documented that 6,835 people entered CPR facilities in 2025. However, only 25.3% of those detained were ultimately repatriated to their countries of origin. That figure represents a 45.1% decline in CPR repatriations compared to levels recorded in 2022. The organisation argued that the disparity demonstrates that individuals are routinely held in administrative detention despite low rates of actual expulsion, arguing that human rights do not stop at national borders.

Externalisation and the Albania agreement

Gere raised particular concern over the bilateral agreement between Italy and Albania, which established offshore asylum processing and detention centres in Shengjin and Gjader. He stated that shifting border management outside European Union territory places these operations beyond the reach of public scrutiny. Gere warned that the facilities in Albania could establish a precedent for other European nations seeking to externalise their own asylum processing systems.

What happens there could become a model for the way Europe will manage migration in the future.

Gere closed his appeal by describing migration as a shared global reality, stating that all people are migrants and calling for the protection of common humanity before time runs out.

Salvini rejects criticism and cites Open Arms case

Italian Deputy Prime Minister, Transport Minister, and Lega party leader Matteo Salvini responded directly to the campaign on social media on the evening of 5 October 2026. Salvini characterised the remarks by Gere as an unjustified attack on Italy and its citizens, rejecting the notion that the country is racist for refusing to accept all incoming migrants.

Richard Gere, the rich gentleman who was supposed to testify against me to send me to jail because I closed the ports to illegal immigrants, returns to attack Italy and Italians. Are we racists because we do not welcome all the immigrants he would like? Dear radical chic who lives in luxury, keep being an actor (a good one, by the way) but avoid giving unsolicited lessons to Italians.

The exchange revives tensions stemming from Salvini's tenure as Interior Minister, during which he enacted a closed-ports policy against non-governmental rescue ships. That policy led to Salvini facing trial on kidnapping charges regarding the Open Arms rescue vessel, where Gere had initially been scheduled to testify against the minister before the testimony was cancelled.