Giorgia Meloni has failed, for the third time, in his attempt to deport Albania to migrants rescued in the Mediterranean, although he has introduced legal changes that sought to force the judges to accept them. After the rejection of the operation in the first two transfers of October and November, this Friday the Court of Appeal of Rome has also not validated the retention on the border of the 49 shipwrecked who arrived on Tuesday at the port of Shëngjin, aboard the military ship Italian Cassiopea. They must be sent to Italy in the next few hours.
Actually, in the Gjäder internment field there were 43 people left, since six had already been returned to Italy. In the exams to which they were subjected to landing in Albania, four turned out to be minor and two were in conditions of vulnerability and precarious health conditions. In any case, it is the largest group deported so far. In the first and second transfer they added 24 people.
For Meloni’s ultra -right government, it is another setback in the crude clash that he maintains with the judiciary, with several open fronts, which he accuses of opposing the popular will and being doing politics. Actually, the judges are just applying the EU laws, which prevent validating the rapid border rejection protocol that Meloni has devised for the Albania model.
The problem is in what is considered a safe country, and whose citizens, therefore, it is presumed that a asylum petition will be rejected. Italy has established a list of 19 countries, and from them comes migrants who are selected to go to Albania. However, according to EU laws, that list is drastically reduced, because they maintain that if there is a territory or population group at risk of violation of rights, the entire State should be considered not sure. That is why it cuts in practice the list of Italy to only seven: Cabo Verde and Balcanic countries. That is, none of the main countries of origin of immigration in Italy, which means liquidating the Albania model. This was established by a judgment of the TJUE (Court of Justice of the European Union) last October, just when the Government of Rome was going to start deportations.
However, Meloni decided to move forward anyway, going to the legal shock. It is what has happened, and today it is confirmed that, for the moment, it continues to losing. The judges choose to comply with European laws, superior to those of Italy, and deny the validation of arrests at the border. That is, they indicate that these people must follow the normal procedure, of entry into the country and detained study of their asylum application. It has happened again with this new group of migrants, which are from Bangladés, Egypt, Gambia and Ivory Coast.
Italian justice, in the midst of great institutional tension in the country, has ended up raising the conflict of criteria to the TJUE, to say who is right, and it is planned to be pronounced on February 25. In fact, the Court of Appeal has expressly said in its resolution that suspends decisions waiting for the TJUE to clarify the issue. However, Meloni had not wanted to wait and the result of this new transfer of migrants has been the same as other times, because nothing has changed in the meantime. Although Meloni wanted to think so.
After the first rejection, in October, the Executive had approved a new law, of greater rank than the previous one, to impose its criteria. But nothing changed, the European norm was still superior. Then he has clung to a recent judgment of the Italian Supreme Court, the Cassation, which established that it corresponds to the Government to decide whether a foreign country is safe or not. But at the same time he recognized the power of a judge to decide in each specific case.
Finally, he withdrew the competence to validate the withholdings on the border of Albania, alleging that they were politicized judges, and transferred it to the Court of Appeal. A scandal was armed, because this organism is already saturated with work. In fact, something funny happened: as I did not supply, this agency assumed the same immigration judges for the task they had decided in the previous deportations. And in the end the judges themselves have decided the same.
