Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission took the side of Giorgia Meloni’s conservative government during a case at the European Court of Justice. The lawsuit was prompted by Italian activist judges who’ve been trying to block the implementation of the administration’s Albania Protocol for months.
The Meloni government has claimed that national law supersedes EU law in determining which countries are “safe” for asylum seekers. Those who come from countries considered safe before reaching Italy have no right to asylum, thus can be deported, the administration argues. Leftist judges have opposed the concept, claiming it violates EU law, and so does the use of Italy’s offshore reception and deportation centers in Albania (established with the Italy-Albania Protocol signed in Tirana in November 2023) for the deportation of failed asylum seekers.
Now, by joining the legal case in Strasbourg, the EU Commission confirmed that this was never the case and that EU member states have the right to decide which countries of origin they designate as “safe” for deportation within certain parameters.
The European Court of Justice began deliberating the case that was submitted by the Rome Civil Court last year on Tuesday, February 25th, but no final ruling is expected until the summer. Still, the fact that the EU Commission backs Meloni’s sovereigntist argument already defeated the Italian Left’s efforts to block the protocol—even though full implementation might have to wait until the ECJ’s final decision about its legality is out.
What this shows is that the EU Commission can no longer ignore EU member states’ demands for properly addressing the migration crisis.
The EU Council (of member states) adopted a resolution last fall in which they not only endorsed Italy’s Albania Protocol but also called on the Commission to begin implementing similar procedures at the EU level, meaning setting up multiple migrant centers in third countries that would be constructed and maintained from the EU budget.
It’s one thing that Giorgia Meloni is too valuable an ally for von der Leyen to alienate, but if the Commission lets the ECJ invalidate the program, it would also undercut the Council majority’s legitimate demand for a similar EU infrastructure in the future.
The reason the Albania Protocol is so sought after by member states is that it would solve one of the biggest problems the EU has with its current asylum procedures, namely the fact that EU law does not allow the detention of migrants pending asylum requests on EU soil, which is regularly abused by migrants who avoid deportation by disappearing into the borderless Schengen area.
The best way to circumvent this is if the migrants intercepted outside the EU are simply not allowed into the bloc until their asylum request has been approved. These off-shore reception facilities would not only help significantly raise the EU’s abysmal deportation rate—less than 20% in the last 5 years—but could also work as a robust deterrence against illegal migrants who only wanted to abuse the shortfalls of the EU asylum systems from the start and therefore speed up the process for genuine refugees.
The dominant leftist faction of the Italian judiciary has blocked the implementation of the protocol three times already, claiming that the countries of origin (Egypt and Bangladesh) cannot be considered “safe” for all of its residents—such as political dissidents or the LGBT community—despite none of the migrants claiming to belong in these vulnerable groups.
In contrast, the European Commission’s position aligns with Meloni’s, namely that it is in the purview of member states to designate countries as safe, even if those countries are not safe for particular groups. If a country of origin is safe, failed asylum seekers can be returned there (unless they belong to those specific groups), and, therefore, can also be detained in these offshore facilities while waiting for their asylum rulings.
Until all judicial obstacles are cleared by a (hopefully) positive ECJ ruling, the Meloni government has made preparations to slightly revise the protocol to bypass the activist judges. Instead of ‘reception centers,’ the facilities could work as deportation centers only, reserved for migrants who have already been rejected in Italy. The original purpose could still be achieved by monitoring migrants’ whereabouts in the country via the use of electronic bracelets of which Rome already ordered a hundred thousand pieces.
