Top EU court strikes a blow against Italy’s Albania migrant camps scheme

Italy has signed a woody with Albania, wherever it planned to process up to 36,000 asylum seekers per year.

The European Union’s apical tribunal has backed Italian judges who questioned a database of “safe countries” drawn up by Rome, arsenic it prepares to deport migrants to detention centres successful Albania.

The hard-right authorities of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni denounced the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) ruling and said it “weakens policies to combat wide amerciable immigration”.

Meloni’s program to outsource migrant processing to a non-EU state and velocity up repatriations of failed asylum seekers has been followed intimately by others successful the bloc.

The costly strategy has been frozen for months by ineligible challenges.

Italian magistrates person cited the European court’s determination that EU states cannot designate an full state arsenic “safe” erstwhile definite regions are not.

On Friday, successful a long-awaited judgement, the Luxembourg-based ECJ said Italy is escaped to determine which countries are “safe”, but warned that specified a designation should conscionable strict ineligible standards and let applicants and courts to entree and situation the supporting evidence.

In its statement, the ECJ said a Rome tribunal had turned to EU judges, citing the impossibility of accessing specified accusation and frankincense preventing it from “challenging and reviewing the lawfulness of specified a presumption of safety”.

The ECJ besides said a state mightiness not beryllium classified “safe” if it does not connection capable extortion to its full population, agreeing with Italian judges that had raised this contented past year.

Meloni and her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, had signed a migration woody successful November 2023, and past year, Rome opened 2 centres successful Albania, wherever it planned to process up to 36,000 asylum seekers per year.

The detention facilities have, however, been bare for months, owed to the judicial obstacles. Last week, a study recovered that their operation outgo was 7 times much than that of an equivalent centre successful Italy.

Government’s attack ‘dismantled’?

The European tribunal made its judgement considering a case of 2 Bangladeshi nationals who were rescued astatine oversea by Italian authorities and taken to Albania, wherever their asylum claims were rejected based connected Italy’s classification of Bangladesh arsenic a “safe” country.

Dario Belluccio, a lawyer who represented 1 of the Bangladeshi asylum seekers astatine the ECJ connected Friday, said the Albanian migrant camps strategy had been killed off.

“It volition not beryllium imaginable to proceed with what the Italian authorities had envisioned earlier this determination … Technically, it seems to maine that the government’s attack has been wholly dismantled,” helium told the Reuters quality agency.

Meloni’s bureau complained that the EU judgement allows nationalist judges to dictate argumentation connected migration, “further reduc(ing) the already limited” capableness of parliament and authorities to instrumentality decisions connected the matter.

“This is simply a improvement that should interest everybody,” it said.

Meanwhile, though the Albanian strategy is stuck successful ineligible limbo, Italy’s wide effort to curb undocumented migration by oversea has been successful.

There person been 36,557 specified migrant arrivals successful the twelvemonth to date, somewhat up from the aforesaid play of 2024, but acold beneath the 89,165 recorded implicit the aforesaid clip span successful 2023.