The human rights of people held in Italy’s migrant detention hubs in Albania are not being protected, Amnesty International said as it warned the EU to reconsider the use of return hubs.

“It is abundantly clear that the Italy-Albania model is impossible to implement in line with Italy’s human rights obligations,” said Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office, as the human rights NGO launched a report on the deal between Rome and Tirana.

“This reality must be a wake-up call for the EU to put any future plans to expand the use of offshore detention and other externalization tools firmly on ice,” Geddie said.

Italy has two migration centers in Albania, including one in the village of Gjadër that was set up in 2024. Initially built as a detention center for migrants intercepted in international waters, the government decided in 2025 to use it to house male asylum seekers who had been ordered to leave Italy and were awaiting deportation. According to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, more than 500 people have been sent there.

According to the Amnesty report, 42 “critical” incidents were recorded between April 11 and May 16, 2025, in the Gjadër center, which it said included self-harm, at least two suicide attempts by hanging, and a violent protest.

The report also raised concerns about “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” during transfers to the hub, and it warned that detention in Albania “significantly undermines” people’s right to seek asylum and justice, as they have limited access to lawyers and courts. The NGO also said that the selection process for transfers to Albania isn’t transparent, raising concerns that it could be “discriminatory or punitive.”

What happens in the centers is “largely shrouded in mystery,” Amnesty also said, as the “Italian government has obstructed independent monitoring of the agreement’s implementation, including by restricting parliamentary oversight and bypassing ordinary legislative processes.”

The Italian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Amnesty said it had been denied access to the detention centers, and therefore based its research on correspondence with the ministry of the interior, reviews of court documents, information shared by civil society networks, reports by MPs and watchdogs, and interviews with U.N. agencies and lawyers.

The scheme, while controversial, is gaining traction across the EU, with new legislation allowing countries to send failed asylum-seekers to so-called return hubs outside the bloc.

Earlier this month, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani advocated for “‘Albania-style’ … centres in various African countries” and “more generally, in countries of origin and transit” ahead of emergency EU talks prompted by the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta.

The deal has come under intense legal scrutiny both in Italy and at the EU’s highest court. A Rome court ruled in 2024 that the first group of migrants sent to Albania as part of the deal could not be detained offshore because their countries of origin — Bangladesh and Egypt— could not be considered safe. 

In a non-binding opinion to the Court of Justice of the EU earlier this year, a top adviser argued that EU law doesn’t prevent a country from setting up detention centers to process failed asylum-seekers outside its own territory, on the condition that the migrants’ rights are fully protected. 

It’s rare enough as it is to get a performance from Ms. Lauryn Hill. It’s even rarer to get a proper Fugees performance today. The 2026 Diaspora Calling! festival in Milton Keynes, England, was the one opportunity to finally see Hill and Wyclef Jean reunite. However, in a horrible turn of events, a curfew cut history short.

In new footage from Diaspora Calling!, the event was cut short as the Fugees were performing. Because their set started a bit late and the venue had a strict 11 pm curfew, they only got to perform for an hour. They tried to address the audience about the sudden stop. However, their microphones were turned off, leaving everyone upset and in the dark about the circumstances.

Naturally, this made everyone extremely upset, including Dave Chappelle. He compared turning off the microphones for Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean to muting civil rights activists. Moreover, he vowed to hold onto his anger for the rest of his life.

“You’re f**king up history,” Chappelle exclaimed. “You turned off the mic on Martin Luther King … Man, y’all f**ked up, I’ll never forget this. Tell them, whoever’s in charge.”

The Fugees Get Cut Off From Their ‘Diaspora Calling!’ Festival Performance

Ms. Lauryn Hill addressed the unfortunate circumstances on social media, admitting it was their first time working a festival of such a scale. Consequently, complications arose, and she’s hoping to learn for future iterations of the festival. Moreover, Hill teased that they’ll have to make it up to the crowd and the special guests they had in store for the rest of their set list.

“This was our first time doing a festival of this size, and the learning curve was important. Every lesson, challenge and victory will be carried forward into the next time we come together,” the Fugees legend shared.

“This was never just about one day. Diaspora Calling! is a gathering to celebrate the collective power, passion, innovation, solutions, beauty and creativity that exists within us across the diaspora. Milton Keynes became a meeting point for this sentiment, and you showed up with unprecedented energy.”

Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill of the Fugees reunited in order to celebrate 30 years of their debut album The Score in 1996. Unfortunately, fellow member Pras wasn’t able to join them due to currently serving 14 years in prison for illegal political donations.

The post Dave Chappelle Compares Cutting Off This Hip-Hop Group to Cutting Off MLK: ‘You’re F**king up History!’ appeared first on VICE.

Zarmina Paryani and her four sisters fear they may soon have to again face the persecutors they fled from in Afghanistan — and this time inside Germany.

Paryani and her sisters were imprisoned twice in Kabul for protesting against the Taliban after the Afghan militants retook the capital in 2021, the 27-year-old said. After going into hiding for several months, the family eventually made their way to Germany in search of safe haven.

But now, Berlin has struck a Faustian bargain that allows the Taliban to deepen its diplomatic foothold in Germany in return for cooperation on deporting Afghan migrants back to Afghanistan. For Paryani and other Afghan activists who resisted the Taliban at home, the arrangement is giving their former persecutors new leverage over their lives in exile.

“It’s hard to accept that my fate and my affairs are being discussed with the very same representatives whose oppression, prisons, whippings and violence I fled from,” Paryani, who worked as a midwife in Kabul and now lives in western Germany, told POLITICO.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government first struck a deal with the Afghan government announced last October that gives Taliban officials control of diplomatic missions in Berlin and Bonn in exchange for permission to return Afghan migrants directly to Afghanistan. That cooperation was deepened early this summer with a deal that allows more Taliban officials to work in Germany in return for cooperation on additional deportation flights — now up to three per month.

Under the new deal, Germany has expanded deportations to include not only Afghan men convicted of crimes, but also, more broadly, Afghan men with no protected status or legal right to remain in Germany.

The agreement with the Taliban makes Germany an outlier in Europe, making it the first EU country to allow Taliban-appointed officials to work in diplomatic missions inside the country. Before the agreement, Western-oriented Afghan officials representing the former government in Afghanistan had remained in charge.

The arrangement comes as Merz’s government grapples with rock-bottom approval ratings and the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now the country’s most popular political force, according to polls. The AfD’s surge comes ahead of two elections in the former East Germany, where the far-right party is ahead in polls by wide margins. In one of those states, Saxony-Anhalt, the party may take real governing power for the first time since it was founded in 2013, a result that would serve as a great humiliation for the conservative Merz, who was elected chancellor last year partly on a promise to crack down on migration.

The AfD’s rise is piling pressure on the chancellor to deliver on his election pledge to deport more migrants — even as he insists that working with the Taliban does not legitimize a regime notorious for its human rights abuses. Overall, Afghans are the third-largest group of refugees or people who have fled war to come to Germany, behind Ukrainians and Syrians.

“We are not extending a hand to this Taliban regime,” Merz said in the German parliament in June. “Rather, we are seeking cooperation at the necessary technical level, which is in our country’s national interest.”

‘Nightmares’ and ‘psychological distress’

For Afghan rights activists in Germany, one of the worst consequences of Berlin’s deal with the Taliban is that it may particularly put at risk some 35,000 Afghans who came to Germany under special humanitarian programs for people deemed especially vulnerable to the Taliban. They include Paryani and her sisters in addition to thousands of human rights activists and Afghans who worked with the German military during its nearly two-decade presence in the country.

Paryani and others fear they will have to face the Taliban when attempting to renew their Afghan passports — which they need to extend their humanitarian visas — at Afghan diplomatic missions. Another 321,000 Afghans live in Germany as refugees or with other forms of protected status. They do not necessarily need Afghan passports, unless they want to apply for a permanent residence status.

More generally, activists and refugees also fear the Taliban, with their growing presence in Germany, could gain access to personal information held in databases in German missions, including details about their families, making them susceptible to blackmail and extortion.

“Given my personal history and my stance on extremism, I am concerned for my safety and that of my family,” one former teacher from Afghanistan granted anonymity due to his fear of retribution from the Taliban told POLITICO.

The former teacher, who lives in Germany with a humanitarian visa, said German immigration officials have asked him to renew his expired Afghan passport, a request that he fears will force him to deal directly with his persecutors.

“This situation continues to cause me significant psychological distress,” he said. “Sometimes I wake up at night because of nightmares related to the Taliban and this situation.”

‘Vulnerable to blackmail’

With its handling of the Taliban, Merz’s government is setting a precedent that will be closely watched by other EU countries. Government officials in Austria and Belgium have said they’re watching Germany’s cooperation with the Taliban closely. Taliban officials also held talks focused on deportations with the EU Commission in June in Brussels.

But Hamid Nangialay Kabiri, the former head of the Afghan consulate in Bonn, who quit last September in protest over the initial deal allowing Taliban officials to serve in diplomatic missions in Germany, warned that the German government’s decision to cooperate with the Afghan regime would come back to haunt it — and that the Taliban would use their new leverage over Germany to advance their interests in Europe, including by building networks that intimidate dissidents.

“They are destroying my country, and now they are coming here,” he said. “They are not thinking of diplomacy. They have a lot of plans in their mind.”

It’s a sentiment politicians inside the left-leaning opposition also share.

“The German government has made itself vulnerable to blackmail,” Schahina Gambir, a lawmaker for the Greens who was born in Kabul, told POLITICO. “We’re seeing recognition through the back door. The Taliban are being granted access to embassies, they’re being granted immunity, they’re given channels for dialogue — and at the same time, the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is getting worse and worse.”

There are already signs that the Taliban are exercising their newfound leverage.

Last May, Kabul unexpectedly halted a deportation flight at the last minute, seemingly seeking to extract additional concessions from the German government. A couple of weeks later, Berlin announced the terms of the latest agreement allowing additional Taliban-appointed officials to work at diplomatic missions in Germany.

Officials in Berlin depicted the new deal as a victory and a practical necessity, allowing for more deportations.

“To increase the number of repatriations, more passports must be issued, more identities must be verified, and so on,” Martin Giese, a spokesperson for Germany’s foreign ministry, said at the time. “To this end, it will also be necessary for more consular officials to be involved.”

But Paryani, the Afghan midwife who fled to Germany with her four sisters, said the Taliban would use their new power to torment them in the country they had sought safety in.

“A Taliban member once wrote to me: ‘Just wait until our embassy in Germany reopens. Then we’ll find you there,'” she said of a comment that had surfaced under one of her social media posts about two years ago. She then deemed it irrelevant because it seemed so unrealistic.

“Today, I feel as though that threat has become a reality,” she said.