With the yes of the Senate, the Albania decree is law: here are the novelties
Blocked transfers in the Cpr in Gjader, ever narrower margins for judges
4' min read
Key points
- Extended the pool of migrants who can be relocated
- The changes in Montecitorio
- The Supreme Court's assist
- The way to overcome non-validation
- Two patrol boats donated to Albania
- The new powers of the Viminale Immigration Directorate
- Cpr detention also possible for asylum seekers
- Accelerated procedure extended to asylum seekers in the Cpr in Albania
- The first Italy-Albania intergovernmental summit later this year
4' min read
The green light is lit for the conversion of the Albania decree into law. The Senate today approved on second reading the measure that had been approved on 15 May by the House, with the trust placed by the government. The aim: to armour migrant transfers from intervention by judges.
Extended the pool of migrants who can be relocated
The new tightening widens the number of foreigners who can be transferred to Albania to persons already detained in detention centres for repatriation in Italy, recipients of a deportation order, including recipients of validated or extended detention orders. Paragraph 1 of the first article of Law Decree 37/2025, by intervening on Law 14/2024 that ratified the Rome-Tirana protocol of 6 November 2023, allowed the de facto reactivation of the operation, after that for migrants rescued in international waters and coming from the so-called safe countries, the only ones to which the accelerated border procedures in Albania could originally be applied, the judges had always suspended the validation of detentions pending the ruling of the European Court of Justice on the legitimacy of the list of safe countries drawn up at the national level.
The changes made in Montecitorio
.In the Constitutional Affairs Committee at the Chamber of Deputies, the package of three amendments presented by the rapporteur Sara Kelany (Fdi) had been approved, with which the government and majority had armoured the transfers from the judges' interventions. The Court of Appeal in Rome, in fact, had refused to validate 18 migrants transferred to the Albanian centre in April, returning them to Italy. The reason? They had applied for international protection once they arrived in Albania and therefore, according to the Italian magistrates, they were not among those who were entitled to stay in Gjader to carry out asylum procedures.
The Supreme Court's assistance
.In the meantime, however, an important assist came from sentence No. 17510 of the first criminal section of the Supreme Court (see Il Sole 24 Ore of 10 May), which established a clear principle of law: it is legitimate to detain a foreigner in the Gjader detention centre for repatriation in Albania even after the application for international protection has been submitted, because the facility is to all intents and purposes equal to Italian centres and the asylum procedure can be carried out without the migrant returning to Italy.
The way to overcome non-validation
.The amendments to the Decree passed in committee move in the same direction. First, they provide that a foreigner transferred to Gjader remains there, as provided for in Article 6(3) of Legislative Decree 142/2015, when there are reasonable grounds to believe that the application for international protection submitted there was made for the sole purpose of delaying or preventing the execution of refoulement or expulsion.
