The Council of Ministers of Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy approved a decree law on Monday evening officially declaring 19 nations as “safe” for returning illegal migrants, as a full-on constitutional battle has broken out over her Albania scheme.
Last week, the Court of Rome ordered the return of 12 illegals from Albania to Italy. The Italian government had sent the migrants, originally hailing from Bangladesh and Egypt, to detention centres established in Albania following an agreement struck between Prime Minister Meloni and Tirana to house Italy’s illegals offshore.
The judges found that because they believed that Bangladesh and Egypt did not qualify as “safe countries” under a recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling, which said that countries could only be considered as safe if their entire territory could be determined to be free from the use of torture, political persecution, the potentiality of indiscriminate violence, or even the death penalty.
On Monday, Meloni summoned her Council of Ministers in a bid to salvage the Albanian scheme from judicial intervention. Before the court ruling, the foreign ministry had listed 22 countries as “safe” for deportations.
However, this list was informal and not backed up by law, and therefore, with the issuance of a decree law declaring 19 countries as safe—removing Cameroon, Colombia, and Nigeria from the original list—Meloni hopes to quash the ability of the left-wing judiciary to prevent the scheme from proceeding.
According to broadcaster RAI, the Italian prime minister said, “We will continue to work tirelessly to defend our borders and to re-establish a fundamental principle: you only enter Italy legally, following the rules and procedures provided.”
“It is a top priority to fight those who exploit people’s legitimate desire to find more favourable living conditions to fatten their profits. The government is determined to dismantle these criminal networks and to eradicate the illegal trafficking of human beings, which fuels the interests of the slave enslavers of the Third Millennium,” she added.
The decree law issued by the Council of Ministers will likely put the government on a collision course with the Court of Rome, in which the fate of the Albania scheme, and likely, therefore, Meloni’s ability to cut illegal immigration, will ultimately need to be settled by the Constitutional Court.
Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio argued Monday that “the definition of a safe country cannot be up to the judiciary; it is a political evaluation even within the parameters of international law.”
The legal battle in Italy may have widespread ramifications for the entire European Union, with countries like Denmark seeking to imitate the Albania scheme and even EU chief Ursula von der Leyen expressing support for the bloc to adopt the Meloni method more broadly.
Commenting on the dispute, European Commission for Home Affairs Anitta Hipper said Monday that “all these measures that the Italian authorities are taking must be in full compliance and should in no way undermine the application of EU law and the treaties.”
However, while she acknowledged that the Court of Rome had cited the European Court of Justice in its ruling on safe countries last week, Hipper noted that there is currently no EU-wide list of countries deemed permissible for returning illegal migrants.
“It is something that is also planned and on which we will have to work. The member states have national lists,” she said.
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