Migrants, new transfer of migrants to Albania by this week

A new transfer of migrants to Albania is expected within this week. The fourth. This time - the government hopes - without the risk that the judges in Rome will frustrate the project by not validating the detentions. To be taken to Gjader will no longer be asylum seekers intercepted at sea, but irregular immigrants to whom the Questore has delivered the expulsion decree and a judge has validated their stay in a CPR.

These days the Viminale is working on the selection of 'candidates' to be taken to Albania. The journey, it is learnt, will take place by ship, departing from Puglia. The destination is the Gjader Stay Centre for Repatriation, which currently has about forty places, but work is underway to increase its capacity to 144.

With the decree-law approved by the Council of Ministers on 28 March, the government hopes to break the deadlock that has so far made the two Albanian facilities 'ghost' centres, which were opened last October after extensive work and since then have been supervised by hundreds of Italian agents. In fact, the measure establishes that migrants currently detained in Italian CPRs and recipients of expulsion orders may also be transferred.

The maximum detention time in this type of centres is 18 months. These centres are often damaged by the guests, are few in number and therefore unable to absorb all the people ordered to leave Italy. Thus it often happens that, as there is no space in the CPRs, these irregular immigrants lose track of them and remain free on the national territory. It is a trend that the government wants to correct by opening more facilities in Italy - one per region was the plan, but it was never completed due to the resistance of the territories concerned - and by extending the plan to Albania, where in a few days the current capacity of about forty places will begin to be filled.

When there is a chance to repatriate them - Tunisia is the country with which Italy has the most effective agreement for repatriations - this must, however, take place with departure from Italy; Gjader's guests will then be returned to Italian soil before being deported. The opposition is on the warpath. A delegation of parliamentarians is ready to leave for Albania together with the Asylum and Immigration Table to monitor 'what criteria were used to select the persons transferred, to verify the modalities of the transfers and the conditions' of detention, 'as well as to monitor the respect of their rights, starting with legal protection and access to medical care'. According to the Association for Legal Studies on Immigration, 'the forced transfer across national borders of people already detained in the CPRs creates a deep fracture in the legal system as a whole. It exacerbates the contraction of constitutional rights such as freedom of thought, the right to housing, and the rights of detained persons to exercise their rights'.