Egypt and Bangladesh 'unsafe' countries: why judges ordered the return of migrants from Albania

The remaining 12 Egyptian and Bengali migrants, taken last Wednesday to the Gjader detention and repatriation centre, will disembark today at the port of Bari to be taken to a facility for asylum seekers. An 'immediate' return in application of the Protocol signed between Giorgia Meloni and her Albanian counterpart Edi Rama, after yesterday the immigration section of the Court of Rome - competent on the basis of the agreement's ratification regulation - issued a lapidary 'does not validate the detention'.

According to Judge Luciana Sangiovanni, in this case there can be no 'accelerated' procedure in Albania, which leads to automatic rejection of asylum in 28 days. But an ordinary one, to be carried out with all precautions in Italy and which can lead to a residence permit for political asylum.

The game is all about the interpretation of 'safe country'. According to a ruling on 7 May by the Court of Justice of the European Union - which reinterpreted Directive 2013/32 ("Common procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection status") - "the designation of a country as a safe country of origin depends on the possibility of demonstrating that, in a general and uniform manner, persecution is never used". This is not certain for Egypt and Bangladesh, considering that even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs defines them as "safe" but "with exceptions for certain categories of people: political opponents, dissidents, human rights defenders". Moreover, the position expressed by Judge Sangiovanni follows those already adopted by other courts. On 10 October last, for example, judges in Palermo rejected eight requests for validation for the detention of Tunisian citizens close to the accelerated procedure, which would have triggered repatriation. In this case too, the ruling of the EU Court of Justice made the difference.

The Immigration Section of Rome, in the 12 cases examined, stated that "in view of the principles established by the EU Court of Justice, the country of origin of the detainee cannot be recognised as a safe country, all the more so since the same judgment emphasises the duty of the judge to find, even ex officio, any violation, in the case submitted to his judgment, of the substantial conditions for the qualification as a safe country" provided for by Directive 2012/32. For this reason, it states that "the prerequisite for the application of the accelerated border procedure does not exist in the case under consideration".

There is a further point that led the judge in Rome not to validate. One of the conditions for applying this accelerated procedure is that the application for international protection must be made by an asylum seeker 'directly at the border or in transit zones', 'after having been stopped for evading or attempting to evade (border) controls'. According to what is written in the order, 'the circumstances and modalities of arrival of migrants at the above-mentioned areas, provided for by the Protocol and the ratification law, exclude that the application of the accelerated border procedure can even be hypothesised'.