The ambitious and controversial plan of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government to deport migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to Albania has ended with a total failure in its first trial: two days after their arrival at the port of Shengjin, none of the 16 transferred migrants were will remain in Albania. In the end, everyone will go to Italy, after a long detour and a high cost of the entire operation (the expense of taking them on a military ship is estimated at 18,000 euros per person). The large Gjadër detention center, measuring 70,000 square meters, which will cost 800 million over five years, will remain empty. Four were sent to Italy on Wednesday afternoon, on the same military ship that had taken them – two because they were minors and two others adults, due to their extremely vulnerable conditions. There were 12 detained, waiting for a judge in Rome to decide in 48 hours whether or not to validate their detention at the border while their asylum request was resolved, within the controversial rapid protocol applied in Albania. But this Friday morning the judge denied permission for them to be detained and ordered them to return to Italy.
The implications of the ruling are enormous and the Italian Government, which is still silent in the face of the judicial setback, must decide what to do now, whether to go ahead with a new deportation or rethink the entire model. Also the Commission and several EU countries, which were looking closely at the Albania model with the hypothesis of replicating it, they should take good note. The judge’s decision is based on a recent resolution of the Court of Justice of the EU that drastically limits which countries can be considered safe and whose citizens Italy can apply the rapid reception and expulsion protocol in Albania. Now the viability of the entire project remains up in the air. Albania modelbecause it would prevent Italy from deporting citizens from all the main countries of origin of immigration arriving through the Mediterranean. It could only send migrants rescued at sea from seven countries to Albania, with very few arrivals this way: Cape Verde, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Albania itself.
Sources from the delegation of deputies that visited the detention center indicate that the deportees could return this Friday or Saturday, on a ship of the Italian Finance Guard that is in the Albanian port of Vlorë. The agreement signed in November 2023 between Albania and Italy expressly says that, if the detention of deported migrants is refused, they must be transferred to Italy “immediately” (article 4, point 3).
What just happened could be seen coming, but the Meloni Government has preferred to move forward, while boasting these days in Brussels about its “innovative” model. What’s more, 90% of requests of this type had already been rejected in the courts of Palermo and Catania. The Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, had warned that he saw “ideological resistance” in the judges and that he would appeal any decision. Now a new confrontation between the Executive and the judiciary is announced.
EU ruling
The key is a recent EU ruling that has established that 15 of the 22 countries that Italy considers safe cannot actually be classified as safe, and therefore their citizens cannot enter the rapid protocol applied in Albania. The resolution left out all the main countries of origin of immigration to Italy, such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia or Libya. The 16 migrants deported in Albania were, precisely, Bangladeshis and Egyptians. The decision of the Rome court refers, in fact, to the EU ruling whose argument is as follows: if in a country there is an area where rights violations occur or a persecuted group occurs, the entire country must be considered unsafe.
This occurs while, in any case, there is a certain legal mess. The asylum request of the 12 migrants has been rejected in another procedure of unprecedented speed in Italy, within the same procedure. Typically, these requests take one or two years. But the Albanian system is designed to be resolved immediately – the entire process of identification, asylum processing and eventual expulsion is intended to be completed in 28 days – and the regulations now provide that asylum applications can begin to be processed even sooner. for the judge to rule on whether these people can be detained. On Thursday, in fact, the commission that decides on asylum requests had already met and had rejected all of them. That is, the 12 deportees may ultimately be repatriated anyway, although they now have 14 days to appeal the decision. In any case, what the judge in Rome said this Friday is that they cannot wait for repatriation in the Gjadër detention center.
Under normal conditions, in Italy, these 12 people would be released pending resolution of their asylum request, but they are in Albania, and the agreements with this country do not contemplate their being able to move around the country. The Italian authorities cannot open the door to the Gjadër complex and let them out. It remains to be seen what will become of these 12 deportees upon their return to Italy. The most likely thing is that since their asylum request has already been negatively resolved, they will be detained in a Repatriation Permanence Center (CPR), waiting for their return to their country to be organized. But here another big mystery opens up, because in reality Italy only manages to repatriate 20% of migrants with an expulsion order.