PM Giorgia Meloni’s national-conservative government on Monday night announced a decree that successfully amends previous legislation about who can designate migrants’ countries of origin as ‘safe.’ It aims to limit significantly the power of the judiciary to hinder the implementation of the use of offshore reception centers for male migrants set up in a Balkan country (the ‘Albania protocol.’)
The decision was made at an emergency meeting of the Council of Ministers on Monday, October 21st, a few days after a civil court in Rome refused to validate the detention of the first dozen migrants bound for Albania. Instead, it ordered the Coast Guard to bring the migrants to Italy because their home countries, Egypt and Bangladesh, could not be considered safe.
The Meloni government fought back by elevating the status of the ‘safe country’ decision from an interministerial decree to ‘primary law.’ The move bypasses the unelected leftist judiciary’s power to block the anti-illegal migration instrument for political reasons.
Under the new law, the government is the only actor able to decide what countries belong to the list of safe states, which will now be reviewed every six months instead of twelve, with almost no room for judicial intervention. From now on, judges will not have to greenlight the detention of migrants each time. They will only be able to appeal in specific cases by explaining the exact reason why individual migrants would not be safe in their countries of origin if deported.
The change was needed after the civil court blocked the twelve migrants’ detention, citing an earlier ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which said a “safe” designation could be challenged based on the lack of either of two parameters: safety throughout the country’s entire territory, or safety guaranteed to all its inhabitants. Since the court argued that Bangladesh was unsafe for LGBT individuals, while Egypt was unsafe for political dissidents, the migrants could not be detained regardless of whether they belonged to either of these groups.
According to Justice Minister Carlo Nordio, the ECJ ruling has been misinterpreted to annul the political decision about safe designations. In reality, it only provided possible arguments for judicial appeal in specific cases, while also recognizing that it was solely a government competence to make that decision in the first place.
At the press conference after the cabinet meeting, Nordio explained that
We have reached this point following a ruling by the European Court of Justice that has not been well understood. In other words, this ruling, in addition to reiterating the principle that it is the [member] states’ duty to identify which states are safe, then sets conditions when a judge intends to give a different definition of a safe state with regard to the situation of certain people.
Therefore, the new law now specifies that any judicial objection can only come in the “appeal stage,” Nordio said, with the core of the legislation being that any judge wishing to challenge detention “must, when ruling, say exhaustively and completely, in the specific case, what the reasons are why that particular country is not considered safe for that [particular] individual.”
This way, the designation of safe countries, set by the government, cannot be revoked by activist judges who wish to annul the detention of dozens or hundreds of migrants at once, as happened in this case. The amendment’s ultimate aim was to ensure, as Nordio underlined, that
If the list of safe countries is found in a law, no judge can override it.
As Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi reminded journalists at the press conference, the European Commission has previously recognized the Albania protocol as “national law” as well as the fact that as long as there is no joint EU list available—something that will only be introduced as part of the new Migration Pact in 2026—designating countries of origin as safe is solely a member state competence.
A future EU-level designation will be decided by Brussels, but it will be tied to historical statistics on asylum applications, automatically making any country with a less than a 20% EU-wide asylum approval rate count as ‘safe.’
During the meeting, the Council of Ministers also updated Italy’s previous 22-country ‘safe’ list and removed Cameroon, Colombia, and Nigeria, but the two countries in question in this case—Egypt and Bangladesh—remained ‘safe’ for now.
With no more legal obstacles in place, the Albania protocol can finally go ahead. Italy hopes to house up to 36,000 adult male migrants in the two facilities every year, preventing those with rejected asylum applications from evading deportation.
While Italian left-wing parties relentlessly attack the government for setting up the centers, the majority of EU member states have voiced support for the protocol and began pushing for turning it into an EU-wide instrument at some point.