New blow for the Giorgia Meloni government’s plan to send migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to identification and repatriation centers in Albania. The judges of the immigration section of the Court of Rome have decided to refer the case of the seven migrants currently detained in centers built by Italy on Albanian territory to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The migrants arrived last Friday as part of the second transfer carried out by Italian authorities since the opening, in mid-October, of the structures which operate de facto as enclaves of Italian jurisdiction. The Court of Rome had to validate the detention of migrants in the centers and the suspension of the procedure implies their release and their transfer to Italy.
Meloni’s plan suffered a first setback on October 18 when the judges of the Court of Rome did not validate the detention of the first 12 people detained in the centers built by Italy on Albanian soil, after the first transfer carried out by blockade. Italian Navy. The first group of migrants consisted of 16 people, but a few hours after their arrival in Albania it was learned that four of them could not stay there, two because they were minors and two because they were vulnerable cases. What NGOs, activists and lawyers have been denouncing for weeks has happened: the express selection carried out immediately after the rescue of migrants at sea did not guarantee that minors and vulnerable people would not end up in Albanian centers. During this second transfer, the same thing happened: eight migrants arrived and one had to be sent to Italy because he was “vulnerable”.
On this occasion, the judges’ decision was balanced by a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union according to which a country can only be considered safe if it is truly safe in its entirety. A definition which eliminated several countries from the list, including Tunisia, Egypt and Bangladesh. The latter two are the states of origin of the first 16 migrants initially deported to Albania as well as the seven in the second group.
The question of “safe countries”
This first decision of the judges thus called into question the notion of “safe country”, central to the implementation of the operational protocol signed a year ago by Italy and Albania for the opening of the centers: only men adults from countries considered safe.
The origin of “safe third countries” allows the application of an accelerated procedure for examining asylum applications, which reduces the time for first assessment to 28 days and reduces the appeal time in the event of first rejection to seven . . by the competent commissions which, in the case of migrants deported to Albania, manage the procedures by videoconference.
To circumvent the judges’ veto, after this first ruling, the Prime Minister convened a Council of Ministers to approve a decree-law whose objective was to protect as quickly as possible the enclaves of Italian jurisdiction built on the other side of the Adriatic. The Government’s idea was that the decree-law being a norm of higher rank than the ministerial decree in force until then, this would serve to protect the protocol signed with Albania against decisions such as that of the Court of Rome that the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, He described it as “abnormal”. This was not the case and the judges decided to refer the case to the Court of Justice of the EU.
“The criteria for designating a state as a safe country of origin are established by European Union law. Thus, without prejudice to the prerogatives of the national legislator, the judge has the duty to always and concretely verify – as in any other sector of the judicial system – the correct application of EU law, which, notoriously, takes precedence over national law. when and incompatible with it, as also provided for in the Italian Constitution,” reads a note from the Court of Rome.
“If the judiciary is overwhelmed, we must intervene,” Nordio said on the occasion of the judges’ first judgment in mid-October. “We did not ignore the European Court’s ruling, but rather misinterpreted it by our judges. The definition of a safe country cannot depend on the judiciary, but constitutes a political assessment within the parameters of international law,” he continued. Words which opened a verbal offensive on the part of the representatives of the majority which supports the Government and which continues to the present. “It’s another political decision,” said the vice-president of the Italian government, Matteo Salvini, after learning of the decision.
