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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was berated by the political opposition on Saturday after her plan to process up to 3,000 asylum-seekers a month in Albania was rejected by Italian judges for a third time.
A coast guard ship was returning the 43 African and South Asian migrants from the detention center in the Albanian town of Gjadër to the Italian port of Bari, under orders from the Rome Court of Appeals, which ruled on Friday that the individuals — whose asylum requests have been rejected — cannot be held abroad.
“Giorgia Meloni should resign,” Elly Schlein, the left-wing leader of the Democratic Party, told Italian media, complaining of the project’s roughly €1 billion cost so far.
“The centers in Albania do not and will not work. They are a clamorous failure,” Schlein said.
The ruling is “confirmation that the detention centers in Albania operate in total illegality [and] is the tombstone for the migration policies implemented” by the Meloni government, added Riccardo Magi, with the liberal More Europe party.
According to the court, the fact that the migrants’ countries of origin are potentially unsafe makes them ineligible for the fast-track processing program, which aims to quickly deport those whose asylum requests have been refused.
It is the third such ruling in a year. In October, the immigration unit of the Rome Court rejected the detention of 12 migrants in Albanian centers, and in November, it blocked the detention of another group of seven.
With each case, judges have deferred the final verdict to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the bloc’s judicial arm. The ECJ hearing is scheduled for Feb. 25.
In response to the judges’ decisions, Meloni’s government in December reassigned the jurisdiction over the matter from the immigration judges in Rome, who had opposed the initial transfers, to the Rome appeals court.
In October, the government also attempted to circumvent these rulings by drafting a new list of 19 countries deemed safe for repatriation, including Bangladesh and Egypt.
Since the inauguration of the two centers in Albania on Oct. 11, the project has received accolades from European leaders, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praising it as “an innovative solution” and asking other EU leaders to draw “lessons from the Italy-Albania protocol.”
At the same time, however, the plan has drawn widespread criticism from opposition politicians, as well as human rights organizations and legal experts.
“The feeling is that the Italian government considers itself above the law,” argued Volt Europe’s Francesca D’Antuono, who visited the center in Gjadër late last year.
“They make no distinction between their own political mandate, won through the elections, and respect for the institutional architecture that underpins our democracy, and that passes, for example, through the division of powers,” D’Antuono said.
“On Feb. 25, the European court in Luxembourg will rule on the issue. We hope it will succeed in stemming the authoritarian turn that far-right governments in Europe are implementing,” D’Antuono said.
