A Turning Point for EU Asylum Governance: Jurisdiction and Rights After Alace and Canpelli Case

This article examines how the Court of Justice of the European Union’s judgment in Alace and Canpelli (Joined Cases C-758/24 and C-759/24) reshapes the legal parameters of extraterritorial asylum processing within the European Union. Building on Italy’s offshore cooperation with Albania for the processing and detention of asylum seekers intercepted at sea, the article argues that the safe country of origin concept and the use of accelerated border procedures cannot neutralise fundamental rights guarantees, even when codified in domestic legislation. The Alace and Canpelli judgment confirms that designations of safe countries of origin are subject to full and ex nunc judicial review and that applicants and courts must have access to the underlying country-of-origin information sources on which legislative presumptions of safety are based. Reading this jurisprudence together with ECtHR case law on non-refoulement, arbitrary detention and effective remedies—including Saadi v United Kingdom and S.H. v Malta—the article shows that extraterritorial schemes such as the Italy–Albania agreement risk producing “accountability gaps” and chain refoulement in violation of EU law, the ECHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention. It contends that offshore processing arrangements displace, rather than share, protection responsibilities and normalise legally opaque forms of migration governance at the EU’s periphery. The article concludes that Alace and Canpelli sets important limits on Member States’ ability to insulate externalisation policies from judicial scrutiny, but that stronger doctrinal and institutional safeguards are needed to prevent the transformation of extraterritorial territories into spaces of diminished rights.