The plans of the Italian right-wing government to house Mediterranean refugees outside the EU are to move to the European level at the request of a court in Bologna.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg is to examine a new decree with which Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wants to save her project. Her first attempt to have asylum applications from migrants decided at a camp in Albania had failed in the Italian judiciary and two recently opened camps are now empty again.
The court in the northern Italian city of Bologna called on the ECJ on Tuesday to review the decree passed by the Meloni government just last week. The focus is particularly on a list of 19 supposedly safe countries of origin for migrants included in the decree. Such lists are also controversial in other EU countries.
Meloni’s handling of Mediterranean refugees is being closely watched within the EU.
The case is based on a man who was picked up in mid-October with 15 other migrants from Bangladesh and Egypt on a refugee boat in the Mediterranean and then brought to Albania by an Italian ship. His asylum application was rejected within 24 hours. However, a court in Rome then ruled that all migrants had to be brought to Italy because, under EU law, neither Bangladesh nor Egypt are completely safe countries of origin.
In the new decree by the Meloni government, however, both states are again defined as safe.
The court in Bologna referred to an ECJ decision stating that a country can only be classified as safe if all social groups in the entire country are actually safe. To illustrate this, the judges drew a comparison with Nazi Germany: “Germany under the Nazi regime was an extremely safe country for the vast majority of the German population, apart from Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, people of Roma ethnicity, and other minority groups. More than 60 million Germans could enjoy an enviable state of security.”
(Source: DPA. Translated from German.)
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