In 2022, Ms Johansson slammed the then-Conservative government in the UK for its plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
She said at the time: “Sending asylum-seekers more than 6,000 kilometers away and outsourcing asylum processes is not a humane and dignified migration policy.”
This also comes as the right-wing government in Italy agreed a deal with Albania to send up to 36,000 male migrants to two deportation centres in the country’s north, a plan slammed by human rights groups and critics as “dehumanising” and “illegal.”
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, celebrated the deal, saying: “It is a new, courageous, unprecedented path, but one that perfectly reflects the European spirit and that has everything it takes to be followed also with other non-EU nations.”
Ms Von der Leyen said of the Italy-Albania deal: “With the start of operations of the Italy-Albania protocol, we will also be able to draw lessons from this experience in practice.”
She continued: “This is about creating so called return hubs in third countries with whom the European Union would have agreements, and for migrants whose right to stay in the EU has been rejected while they’re waiting to be returned to the country that they came from.”
