New chapter in the fight between justice and the Italian Government over the plan to send migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to detention centers in Albania. The judges of the Court of Bologna have decided to take to the Court of Justice of the European Union the decree with which the Executive led by Giorgia Meloni wanted to save the plan by establishing by law the list of “safe countries” from which the migrants come and to which which, in the intentions of the Government, can be returned.
The Bologna judges ask the European Court to decide whether the decree should be applied or not since they consider that the criteria used by the Government to designate a country as safe “contravene” European law. The judges’ resolution, reported by the Italian newspaper Corriere de la Sera, It is a new setback in the path of this experiment in externalizing borders launched by the Meloni Government.
The decree law – with a higher rank than the ministerial decree in force until now – approved last week establishes a list of “safe countries” to circumvent the veto opposed by the judges of the Court of Rome who refused to endorse the detention of the first 12 migrants in the centers built by Italy on Albanian soil.
The judges relied on a recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union which, on October 4, ruled that a country can be considered safe only if it really is safe in its entirety. A definition that eliminated de facto from the list to several countries, including Tunisia, Egypt and Bangladesh. These last two were the states of origin of the 16 migrants initially deported to Albania, before, a few hours after disembarking, four of them had to be returned to Italy, two for being minors and two for being considered “ “vulnerable.”
The decision of the judges in Rome called into question one of the pillars of the operational protocol signed by Italy and Albania a year ago for the opening of the centers in the Albanian towns of Gjader and Shengjin: only adult men rescued by Italian authorities in the Mediterranean from countries considered safe.
The origin of “safe third countries” allows the application of an accelerated procedure for the examination of asylum applications, which reduces the time for the first evaluation to 28 days and reduces the period to file an appeal in the event of a first rejection to seven. by the commissions in charge, which, in the case of migrants deported to Albania, manage the procedures by videoconference.
The Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, said last week that the decree law, which reduces the “safe countries” from 22 to 19, would serve to avoid other sentences such as those of the Court of Rome that he called “abnormal”, in some cases. statements for which the opposition called for his resignation. “If the judiciary is overwhelmed, we must intervene,” Nordio said.
His words were the prelude to days of a verbal offensive by several representatives of the Government against “politicized justice” and the “red robes”, with tones that recalled the eternal struggle between justice and Silvio Berlusconi. And in this climate of tension, last Thursday Judge Silvia Albano, one of the members of the Rome Court who ruled against keeping immigrants in Albania, received death threats.
The judges’ doubts
“The international protection system is, by its very nature, a legal guarantee system for minorities exposed to risks from persecutory agents,” write the Bologna judges in the resolution sent to the European Court, published by the Corriere. “Except for exceptional cases (the borderline cases of Romania during the Ceausescu regime or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, perhaps), persecution is always carried out by a majority against certain minorities, sometimes very small. It could be said, paradoxically, that Germany under the Nazi regime was an extremely safe country for the vast majority of the German population: apart from Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, Roma and other minority groups, more than 60 million Germans enjoyed an enviable security status. The same can be said of Italy under the fascist regime. If a country were considered safe when security is guaranteed for the general population, the legal notion of a safe country of origin could be applied to almost any country in the world, which would therefore be a notion lacking any legal coherence. the judges conclude.
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