Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reacted with fury on Friday as the EU’s top court raised the threshold for member countries to reject asylum-seekers.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said EU nations may only create national lists of safe countries outside the bloc if they fully justify their assessments with public sources.
According to the court, a country can only be considered “safe” for repatriation if “the entire population” is protected across all regions.
Meloni called the court’s decision “surprising” and a power grab by EU judges. “Once again, the judiciary, this time at the European level, claims spaces that do not belong to it, in the face of responsibilities that are political,” she said.
The case was brought by two Bangladeshis who were rescued at sea and brought to an Italian detention center in Albania. They challenged the rejection of their asylum application, arguing that Bangladesh is not safe, contrary to its designation on Italy’s list of safe countries.
Friday’s ruling impacts Italy’s so-called Albania model. In 2023, Meloni struck a deal with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama to detain and process the asylum claims of up to 30,000 migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean, building two facilities in Albania.
However, the plan has faced repeated setbacks in Italian courts.
Judges refused to validate the detention of the first three groups of asylum-seekers transferred to Albania in October and November 2024, and February, citing a CJEU ruling from October that said the criteria for designating a third country as a safe country of origin must be met throughout its territory. In those cases, Bangladesh and Egypt were not considered fully safe across all regions or for all groups of people.
In an attempt to bypass this legal obstacle, the Italian government issued a decree in December listing 19 countries, including Bangladesh and Egypt, as “safe” for repatriation.
But Italian judges — who Meloni has been at odds with for years — referred the matter to the CJEU, seeking clarification on how a country’s safety should be determined and whether EU law overrides national law in cases of conflict.
Meloni vowed that Italy would pursue all possible technical and legal solutions in the 10 months remaining before the new EU Migration Pact takes effect.
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