Centres in Albania, two years without peace. And it is dark about the actual costs

Here lurks the first vulnus. Because on 4 October 2024, on the very eve of the openings of the centres - in Shëngjin the one for identification and eligibility procedures; in Gjader, twenty kilometres inland, a centre for the detention of asylum seekers with 880 places, plus a CPR with 144 places and a small prison with 20 places - the EU Court of Justice ruled that a country cannot be considered safe if it is not safe in certain areas of its territory or for certain categories of people, such as homosexuals. The Italian list, renewed on 7 May by a decree of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is faltering.

Based on the ruling of the Luxembourg judges, once the facilities opened on 14 October and the first transfer of 16 migrants on board the navy's Libra ship (four of whom were immediately sent to Italy, two because of health problems and two because they were minors), the immigration section of the Court of Rome decides not to validate the detentions in Gjader of the remaining 12, who are sent to Bari with the coast guard's patrol boat Visalli.

The government's reaction is to hurriedly pass a decree-law at the Council of Ministers on 21 October (a decree that was later merged in Parliament into the Flows Decree) to raise the list of safe countries from a secondary to a primary norm and strengthen its solidity. Confirmed in the list are 19 countries - Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Morocco, Montenegro, Peru, Senegal, Serbia, Sri Lanka and Tunisia - that is, all those previously indicated by the Farnesina except Cameroon, Colombia and Nigeria. A path with which the Executive tries to reaffirm its supremacy over a choice that "is not up to the judges". The Parliament will add its own: in the phase of conversion of the Dl, it will subtract from the immigration sections of the courts the competence to decide in first instance on detentions, both in terms of validation and extension, to devolve it to the Courts of Appeal in monocratic composition.

The reason is simple: even on 8 November, when the ship Libra landed again in Albania, this time with just eight migrants, still traced in the waters south of Lampedusa, the script repeated itself. One had been immediately transferred to Bari, because he was found to be vulnerable for health reasons, for the others a few days later the Roman judges again failed to validate the detention. With one more detail: they suspended the judgement and, on the basis of what had already been done by the courts of Bologna, of Catania and of Palermo (intervening on the detentions of other asylum seekers in Italian prisons), they raised the issue before the EU Court of Justice.

In December 2024, the Supreme Court of Cassation also intervened: on 19 December, following a preliminary referral requested by the Capital Court, it opened the way for the disapplication of the ministerial decree on safe countries when the presumption of safety contrasts with the different qualification criteria defined by EU regulations; on 30 December, in an order, called into question by the Government's appeal against the lack of validation, it recognised that it is up to the Executive to determine the list of safe countries, but also that the judge can and must intervene in the individual case. But it suspends the judgement in view of the European Court of Justice's ruling urged by the Italian courts.

Since November, the government has chosen to stop the transfers, which resume at the end of January. But they are more failures. Forty-nine of them disembarked from the navy ship Cassiopea at the port of Shengjin: six of them were transferred to Brindisi after being screened at the hotspot; for the other 43, the Court of Appeal (where, ironically, the same judges of the immigration section are applied due to staff shortage) suspended the judgement on the validation of detentions, releasing the migrants "pending the decision of the European Court of Justice" expected on 25 February.

Thus, within the government, the decision matured to proceed with a new decree law (37/2025) that was approved in the Council of Ministers on 28 March and did not amend the Rome-Tirana Protocol, but only the transposing law. With one objective: to clarify that the Gjader facility will not only be able to host people picked up in international waters by Italian military ships and coming from safe countries, as provided for by law 14/2024, but also migrants already present in the CPRs in Italy, i.e. recipients of expulsion orders and detainees. A change that serves to relaunch the operation by circumventing the magistrates' stops.

On 11 April, in fact, the ship Libra leaves with 40 migrants from Italian centres. But a new stumbling block is just around the corner, because it turns out that, in the absence of an agreement for the execution of expulsions allowing repatriations from a third country, they must first be transferred back to Italy. Not only: the Court of Appeal in Rome ruled that a foreigner who, after being transferred, applies for international protection cannot be detained in the Albanian centre. The government once again took corrective action and, with a package of amendments tabled to the Law Decree in the Chamber of Deputies, 'corrected' its aim: on 20 May the measure became law and the judges' margins of intervention were increasingly reduced.

In the meantime, again in May, came both a new ruling by the Supreme Court of Cassation that comforted the Executive, because it established the principle of law according to which it is legitimate to detain a foreigner in the Cpr in Gjader even after an asylum application has been submitted, and two ordinances that instead worried it because they still raised doubts and questions to the EU Court of Justice. Which finally ruled on 1 August. A cold shower: the designation of a third country as a 'safe country of origin' does not exclude, even when it is established by law, judicial review of individual cases. The reaction of Palazzo Chigi is vehement: that of the Court is an undue intrusion in "spaces that do not belong to it".

Since then, while the oppositions all continue to cry failure and demand accountability for costs and waste, only the Cpr in Gjader, with limited numbers, can continue to function in Albania. Another void hangs over all the repatriation centres, which the Viminale has promised to fill: in July, the Constitutional Court, with its pronouncement 96/2025, pointed out that there is a lack of rules regulating the 'methods' of detention to ensure that migrants deprived of their personal freedom can enjoy the guarantees provided by the Charter.

Meloni is waiting for 2026 and for Europe's moves, but in the meantime she has moved the goalposts and started to press, together with eight other European countries such as Denmark, for a revision of the international conventions on migrants, in particular the European Convention on Human Rights, so that member states can act without strings (and without the pro-migrant rulings of the European Court of Human Rights) against irregular migration and human trafficking. Yesterday a meeting was held at Palazzo Chigi at senior civil servant level: the horizon is 10 December, when the Committee of Ministers in Strasbourg should start the path towards a political declaration within the Council of Europe to be adopted next year.