The ambitious and controversial plan of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government to deport migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to Albania has ended in total failure in its first trial: two days after your arrival at Shengjin portnone of the 16 transferred migrants will stay in Albania. In the end, everyone will return to Italy. The large Gjadër detention centre, measuring 70,000 square metres, which will cost €800 million over five years, will remain empty. Four were sent to Italy already on Wednesday afternoon, on the same military ship that had taken them ―two for being minors and two other adults, due to their conditions of extreme vulnerability. 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. Sources from the delegation of deputies that visited the detention center indicate that they could return today, on a ship of the Italian Finance Guard that is in the Albanian port of Vlorë.
What just happened could be seen coming, but the Meloni Government has preferred to move forward, while boasting these days in Brussels of its “innovative” model and the EU is closely following the experiment with the hypothesis of expanding it. 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.
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, from Bangladesh and Egypt. 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 Albania’s system is designed to be resolved immediately, and the regulations now provide that asylum applications can begin to be processed even before the judge rules on whether these people can be detained. On Thursday, in fact, the commission that decides on the requests had already met and had rejected all of them. That is, the 12 deportees will be repatriated anyway. But this Friday’s decision by the Rome judge means that they cannot wait for repatriation in Gjäder detention center.
Under normal conditions, in Italy, they 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.
