Following months of legal challenges, an Italian navy vessel has been sent to Shëngjin in Albania, this time carrying 49 illegal migrants from various countries which are deemed to be safe. These were to be taken to detention centres—two of which have already been built in Albania, but have been empty since November—with the goal of deterring future Mediterranean Sea crossings.
Left-wing judges and politicians will no doubt again be out in force to see that these migrants are ‘returned’—that is, to Italy rather than to their countries of origin—and, more broadly, that Giorgia Meloni’s programme for offshore processing is brought to halt.
The government said on Sunday that all those en route to Albania were adult males in good mental and physical health. They represent a small fraction of the 469 migrants who landed in Lampedusa on Friday, and the further 127 who arrived on Saturday, according to a La Stampa report.
Andrea Delmastro, a parliamentarian from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, celebrated the third attempt at ‘Operation Albania,’ describing it as “a policy of seriousness and pragmatism to protect borders and ensure effective management of immigration.”
This most recent voyage is reported to have contradicted the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) ruling that asylum applications cannot be fast-tracked if the country the migrant came from is not ‘wholly safe.’ Migrants from Bangladesh and Egypt were on board the vessel, despite the court ruling that these were not safe countries.
To circumvent ECJ’s ruling, Meloni’s administration late last year changed the law so that the designation of countries was chosen only by the government, and made efforts to clamp down on the room for legal wranglings.
Italy may be the first European Union nation to send migrants to a non-EU state for processing, but it is not the only one to support such a policy, both in the hope of deterring unwanted arrivals and of prioritising the acceptance of migrants who are genuinely in need. Whether there is the required necessary to widen such a policy to a Europe-wide level remains to be seen.
An ECJ hearing on Italy’s plan has been provisionally set for February.
