Court of Bologna refers 'safe countries' decree to the EU Court: "Nazi Germany safe country too?"

The Court of Bologna referred to the European Court of Justice the case of a Bangladeshi citizen who had applied for international protection: the question is, in essence, whether Community law should prevail or Italian law which, with the recent decree on 'safe countries', intervened to define with a primary law what until a few weeks before was defined by an inter-ministerial decree, with the aim of making the identification centres in Albania operational.

The Bologna court's referral essentially takes the form of a request for clarification on two issues: what is the parameter on which to identify the so-called safe countries and whether the principle of European primacy dictates that in the event of a conflict between regulations, the Community one prevails. A request, as the president of the Tribunal Pasquale Liccardo said, that has above all the objective of the uniform application of European Union law. It is precisely on the definition of 'safe country' that the long question that the tribunal sent to Luxembourg is based, however, also entering into the merits and contesting the principle whereby a country could be defined as safe if the generality, or majority, of the population lives in conditions of security, given that the international protection system is aimed in particular at threatened and persecuted minorities.

It also leads to the paradox that Nazi Germany had been extremely safe for the vast majority of the German population, with the exception of Jews, homosexuals, political opponents and Roma. The court asks whether, based on this definition, European law continues to take precedence over Italian law. And it makes explicit reference to the Bangladesh case, starting precisely from the proceedings that triggered the referral, recalling that the cases in which the need for international protection is found are related to membership of the Lgbtqi+ community, victims of gender-based violence, ethnic and religious minorities, not to mention so-called climate displaced persons.

The spirit of the decree, the court suggests, would therefore have the character of 'a political act, determined by the higher needs of governing the migratory phenomenon and defending the borders, regardless of the information and judgments expressed by the competent ministerial offices regarding the security conditions of the designated country'.

A decision that has re-ignited the political controversy over the Meloni government measure, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini frontally attacking the Bologna judges. "If someone, instead of being in court, feels in the headquarters of Rifondazione Comunista, take off your toga, stand for election and do politics," says Salvini. "There cannot," he continues, "be judges who take apart in the evening what others do in the morning. We are also tired of working, as the citizens ask us to, to bring more security, only to have some communist judge, that is, who believes that borders are not needed and that laws are not needed, and that everyone has the right to do what they want." "Meloni and Piantedosi," says Riccardo Magi of +Europa, "are trying for the umpteenth time to bypass the obligations arising from European law that they themselves know are insuperable. More than victims: they are the ones who are deliberately going to head-on collision with the judiciary'. Nicola Fratoianni, leader of Sinistra Italiana, is also on the same line: 'When one does not want to be aware of reality, when every occasion is good for making bad propaganda, when one decides not to respect international norms, it is evident that sooner or later one finds oneself in trouble'.