ROME: Italy’s government said it would use its Albanian migrant centers for people awaiting deportation, the latest attempt to salvage a costly scheme frozen for months by legal challenges.
The two Italian-run facilities, located near the coast in northern Albania, were opened last October as processing centers for potential asylum seekers intercepted at sea, an experimental project closely watched by EU partners.
But Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s ministers agreed on Friday that the centers will now primarily serve as repatriation facilities to hold migrants who are due to be sent back to their home countries.
BACKGROUND
The modification means that migrants who have already arrived on Italian shores could be sent across the Adriatic to a non-EU country to await their repatriations.
The modification means that migrants who have already arrived on Italian shores could be sent across the Adriatic to a non-EU country to await their repatriations.
Meloni, whose far-right Brothers of Italy party has vowed to cut irregular migration, has cast the scheme as a “courageous, unprecedented” model.
But the plan has run into a series of legal roadblocks, and the centers have stood mainly empty.
Italian judges have repeatedly refused to sign off on the detention in Albania of migrants intercepted by Italian authorities at sea, ordering them to be transferred to Italy instead.
The European Court of Justice, ECJ, is now reviewing the policy.
On Friday, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said the new decree modifying the Albania plan “allows us to give immediate reactivation” of the migrant centers.
“The plan is going ahead,” he told journalists, saying the use change “will not cost €1 more.”
The scheme was signed between Meloni and her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, in November 2023.
Under the plan, Italy would finance and operate the centers, where migrants considered to be from “safe” countries, and therefore unlikely to be eligible for asylum, would have their cases fast-tracked.
The first group of 16 migrants arrived in October, but they were promptly sent to Italy after judges ruled they did not meet the criteria.
Italy responded by modifying its list of so-called “safe countries,” but judges ruled twice more against subsequent detentions and referred the issue to the ECJ, which is expected to issue a ruling after May or June.
Meloni’s coalition government has cast the court rulings as politically motivated.
Italy’s opposition has decried government waste over the experiment, due to it costing an estimated €160 million ($173 million) per year, even as rights groups have worried that migrant protections would not be respected in the centers.
On Friday, former prime minister Matteo Renzi, a centrist, said the facilities would require a further €30 million to €50 million were they to be transformed into repatriation centers, calling them “useless structures, creatures of Giorgia Meloni’s propaganda.”
The leader of the center-left opposition Democratic Party, Elly Schlein, challenged the legal basis of the modification, saying European law “does not allow a repatriation center to be relocated to a third country.”
“The government has no qualms about trampling on fundamental rights and wasting more resources of Italians with its empty and harmful propaganda,” she wrote.
Immigration lawyer Guido Savio said that with the change announced on Friday, the government is trying to show that it can “make them work” while casting itself at the forefront of an “innovative” European policy on migration.
Savio said the changes will allow the government to prepare early for a draft EU regulation that would provide for outsourcing migrant centers to non-EU, so-called third countries, which is not due to take effect before 2027.
But Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo, another immigration attorney, predicted an “avalanche of appeals” after the latest government action, which he said has “no legal basis.”
The latest move has “highly symbolic” importance for the government, which “does not want to show the failure of the Albania model,” he said.
Undocumented migration via the Central Mediterranean route between North Africa and Italy fell by 59 percent last year, with 67,000 migrant arrivals, according to European border agency Frontex, due to fewer departures from Tunisia and Libya.
