The European Union’s top court on Friday backed Italian judges who questioned a list of ‘safe countries’ drawn up by Rome to deport migrants to detention centres in Albania.
The hard-right government of prime minister Giorgia Meloni denounced the European Court of Justice’s ruling and said it ‘weakens policies to combat mass illegal immigration’.
Meloni’s plan to outsource migrant processing to a non-European Union country and speed up repatriations of failed asylum seekers has been followed closely by others in the bloc.
The costly scheme has been frozen for months by legal challenges.
Italian magistrates have cited the European court’s decision that EU states cannot designate an entire country as ‘safe’ when certain regions are not.
In its ruling published Friday, the court did not contest Italy’s right to designate so-called ‘safe countries of origin’.
‘However, a Member State may not include a country in the list of safe countries of origin if that country does not offer adequate protection to its entire population,’ it ruled.
It furthermore said the sources of information on which the government’s ‘safe country’ designation is based should be accessible both to the defendant and to courts.
In the case considered by the court, two Bangladeshi nationals taken to an Albanian migrant centre were denied the possibility of ‘challenging and reviewing the lawfulness of such a presumption of safety’.
‘A Member State may not designate as a ‘safe’ country of origin a third country which does not satisfy, for certain categories of persons, the material conditions for such a designation,’ it said.
Italy’s ‘safe country’ list included Egypt, Bangladesh and Tunisia, where human rights group have documented abuses against certain minorities.
Italy’s government said the court was ‘claiming powers that do not belong do it, in the face of responsibilities that are political.’
Meloni and her Albanian counterpart Edi Rama signed the Albania migrant deal in November 2023.
Under the plan, Italy would finance and operate detention centres designed to fast-track the processing of migrants from ‘safe’ countries, and therefore unlikely to be eligible for asylum.
Several migrants have been sent to the centres from October last year but they have been sent back to Italy after judges ruled they did not meet the criteria to be detained there.
Italy responded by modifying its ‘safe’ list but judges ruled twice more against subsequent detentions and referred the issue to the ECJ.
The court noted, however that European law will change in June 2026, allowing ‘exceptions for such clearly identifiable categories of persons.’
Meloni’s government has cast the rulings by Italian judges as politically motivated.
