Italy has signed a deal with Albania, where it planned to process up to 36,000 asylum seekers per year.
The European Union’s top court has backed Italian judges who questioned a list of “safe countries” drawn up by Rome, as it prepares to deport migrants to detention centres in Albania.
The hard-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni denounced the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) ruling and said it “weakens policies to combat mass illegal immigration”.
Meloni’s plan to outsource migrant processing to a non-EU country and speed up repatriations of failed asylum seekers has been followed closely by others in the bloc.
The costly scheme has been frozen for months by legal challenges.
Italian magistrates have cited the European court’s decision that EU states cannot designate an entire country as “safe” when certain regions are not.
On Friday, in a long-awaited judgement, the Luxembourg-based ECJ said Italy is free to decide which countries are “safe”, but warned that such a designation should meet strict legal standards and allow applicants and courts to access and challenge the supporting evidence.
In its statement, the ECJ said a Rome court had turned to EU judges, citing the impossibility of accessing such information and thus preventing it from “challenging and reviewing the lawfulness of such a presumption of safety”.
The ECJ also said a country might not be classified “safe” if it does not offer adequate protection to its entire population, agreeing with Italian judges that had raised this issue last year.
Meloni and her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, had signed a migration deal in November 2023, and last year, Rome opened two centres in Albania, where it planned to process up to 36,000 asylum seekers per year.
The detention facilities have, however, been empty for months, due to the judicial obstacles. Last week, a report found that their construction cost was seven times more than that of an equivalent centre in Italy.
Government’s approach ‘dismantled’?
The European court made its judgement considering a case of two Bangladeshi nationals who were rescued at sea by Italian authorities and taken to Albania, where their asylum claims were rejected based on Italy’s classification of Bangladesh as a “safe” country.
Dario Belluccio, a lawyer who represented one of the Bangladeshi asylum seekers at the ECJ on Friday, said the Albanian migrant camps scheme had been killed off.
“It will not be possible to continue with what the Italian government had envisioned before this decision … Technically, it seems to me that the government’s approach has been completely dismantled,” he told the Reuters news agency.
Meloni’s office complained that the EU judgement allows national judges to dictate policy on migration, “further reduc(ing) the already limited” capacity of parliament and government to take decisions on the matter.
“This is a development that should concern everybody,” it said.
Meanwhile, though the Albanian scheme is stuck in legal limbo, Italy’s overall effort to curb undocumented migration by sea has been successful.
There have been 36,557 such migrant arrivals in the year to date, slightly up from the same period of 2024, but far below the 89,165 recorded over the same time span in 2023.