New blow to 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 to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) the case of the seven migrants currently held in the centers built by Italy in Albanian territory. The migrants arrived last Friday in the second transfer carried out by the Italian authorities since the opening, in mid-October, of the structures that function de facto as enclaves of Italian jurisdiction. The Court of Rome had to validate the detention of the migrants in the centers and the suspension of the procedure implies their release and their transfer to Italy.
Meloni’s plan had received a first setback on October 18 when the judges of the Court of Rome did not validate the detention of the first 12 people held in the centers built by Italy on Albanian soil, after the first transfer carried out by a blockade. the Italian navy. The first group of migrants was 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 had been denouncing for weeks had happened: that the express selection made immediately after the rescue of the migrants at sea did not guarantee that minors and vulnerable people would not end up in the Albanian centers. In this second transfer the same thing also happened: eight migrants arrived and one had to be sent to Italy for being “vulnerable.”
On that occasion, the judges’ ruling was weighed by a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union according to which a country can be considered safe only if it really is safe in its entirety. A definition that eliminated several countries from the list, including Tunisia, Egypt and Bangladesh. These last two are the states of origin of the first 16 migrants initially deported to Albania and also of the seven in the second group.
The question of “safe countries”
That first decision of the judges thus called into question the concept of a “safe country”, central to the implementation of the operational protocol signed by Italy and Albania a year ago for the opening of the centers: only adult men 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.
To circumvent the judges’ veto, after that first ruling, the prime minister convened a Council of Ministers to approve a decree law whose objective was to shield as soon as possible those 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 that moment, this would serve to shield the protocol signed with Albania against decisions such as that of the Court of Rome that the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, He called it “abnormal.” This has not been the case, and now the judges have decided to refer the matter 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. Therefore, 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 legal system – the correct application of EU law, which, notoriously, prevails over EU law. national when and incompatible with it, as also provided for by the Italian Constitution,” reads a note from the Court of Rome.
“If the judicial power is overwhelmed, we must intervene,” Nordio said on the occasion of the judges’ first ruling in mid-October. “The ruling of the EU Court was not disregarded by us, but rather misinterpreted by our judges. The definition of a safe country cannot depend on the judiciary, but is a political evaluation within the parameters of international law,” he continued. Words that opened a verbal offensive by representatives of the majority that supports the Government that continues until now. “It is another political sentence not against the Government, but against the Italians and their security,” said the vice president of the Italian Government, Matteo Salvini, after learning of the ruling.
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