Meloni’s offshore migrant detention scheme fails for third time as Italy forced to take back asylum seekers
2 February 2025, 11:13
An Italian navy ship was forced to take migrants back to Italy from asylum processing centres in Albania on Saturday, dealing a fresh blow to far-right PM Meloni.
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It was the third time Giorgia Meloni's far-right government tried and failed to process migrants in the non-EU country.
A coast guard ship took 43 migrants from Bangladesh, Egypt, Ivory Coast and Gambia, who had been taken to Albania for processing after being found in the Mediterranean, back to Italy.
They were among the 49 men who were transferred to Albania on an Italian naval ship on Tuesday. Six were returned the same day for being minors or deemed vulnerable.
It came after a court ruling in Rome questioned the validity of the scheme with regards to a recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling.
The Italian appeals court on Friday refused to approve the speedy expulsion of the 43 asylum seekers detained in Albania under a controversial migration deal to move the proceedings beyond European Union borders.
The agreement has raised concerns among human rights activists, who have called it a 'dark day for the EU'.
But European partners have expressed interest in the project, marking a distinct anti-immigration turn.
On Friday, the court referred the case to the ECJ, in Luxembourg, which is expected to issue a ruling on February 25 related to the previous cases. The series of lower court rulings have sparked a rift between the Meloni government and the Italian judicial system.
Italy’s opposition parties have welcomed the blow to Meloni’s far-right government.
"As any person with common sense would have imagined, yet another deportation of migrants to Albania has come to nothing," Nicola Fratoianni, from the Green-Left Alliance party, told Reuters.
The Italian interior ministry has declined to comment.
The detention camps Meloni’s government built in Albania have remained empty since November, when judges last ordered migrants to be transferred back to Italy.
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In October and November, judges also refused to approve the expulsion of much smaller groups of migrants, seeking clarity from the European court on which countries were safe for repatriation of people whose asylum claims are rejected.
Italy last year signed a five-year deal to process up to 3,000 migrants a month beyond EU borders as part of Meloni's programme to combat illegal migration to Italy, which is the first landfall for tens of thousands of migrants who make the perilous journey across the central Mediterranean Sea.
In the first four weeks of this year, 3,704 migrants arrived in Italy, almost three times as many as in the same period last year.
In the whole of last year, 66,317 migrants arrived in Italy, a drop of 58% from the previous year. The largest nationality was Bangladeshis, followed by Syrians, Tunisians and Egyptians, according to Italy's Interior Ministry.
