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The point is that it's only superficially about humanitarianism and actually largely about forswearing a type of aggression between roughly equal nation-states that is annoying to defend against.
Who is going to operate the prison hole in Djibouti you are talking about? The Djiboutians would neither be efficient nor incentivised to keep the people in, and would demand a lot of money for it if their internal politics don't randomly whiplash against operating it for any price; for the French running a prison in Djibouti - assuming they can rent the land or muscle themselves into it, which is not so clear - might turn out more expensive than running the same prison in France. (I haven't looked up the operational costs, direct and indirect, of Guantanamo Bay which seems to be the closest equivalent of what you are proposing, but I doubt it's cheaper than your run-of-the-mill federal supermax.)
If the humanitarianism is superficial then what problem are we facing? By the sound of things many on the far right in Europe are not against the EU per se. I don't see why, if we're not maintaining some facade of treating native first worlders and foreign third worlders the same, that the sky will fall as a consequence. European nations can continue working together despite that.
As for Djibouti, the French already have a military base there. Which they could run with an additional prison complex for as cheap as the French can run things overseas given they have the French Foreign Legion stationed there. It would be much less Guantanamo Bay and much more refugee camp you can't leave.
But that's kind of besides the point. I'm not attached to any one mechanism for doing things like that. I mentioned it more in passing than anything. The third world manages to house their criminals. I don't see the task as being impossible or even that hard for France. Nor why it would end up being prohibitively expensive.
If France had third worlders with no land to call home that commit crime, ship 'em out to prisonland.
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