Italy activates second deportation of migrants to Albania but only manages to transfer eight International

The second deportation of migrants rescued at sea from Italy to Albania is already underway, after the failure of the first, but as soon as it has started, it can be said that it again feels like a failure and further Raises questions on the feasibility of the right government plan by Georgia Meloni, which is once again in question. If in the first transfer a military ship with a crew of about 70 people was mobilized to transport only 16 migrants to the port of Shengjin, this time there are even fewer people on board the same ship: according to Italian media, eight Nationality has not yet been revealed and he is expected to arrive in the Balkan country tomorrow, Thursday or Friday.

This is a small fraction of all those who have arrived on the island of Lampedusa in two days, more than 1,200 people, and a tiny fraction of what is planned at the larger Gazadar detention camp in Albania, with more than 1,000 places. Is a group. That is to say, it has been confirmed that very few migrants actually meet the criteria to be deported. And those few people still have to pass through the filters of the immigration court in Rome, which must validate their retention within 48 hours after reaching the ground, and at the first opportunity this caused the entire operation to fail.

estimated cost of one billion

Despite the fact that it was expected that this time it would be a larger group, the small number of migrants transferred once again raises questions about the cost of the operation. Italy plans to invest 653.3 million euros over five years for the Gazadar detention camp, located an hour’s drive north of Tirana. Of them, 260 million personnel, 295 officers and agents are deployed at the site for dispatch, salary and maintenance and are housed in a five-star hotel complex. However, the opposition says that this is the minimum estimated figure and ultimately the budget will reach one billion. With the first transfer of 16 migrants, the opposition has already calculated expenses of 18,000 euros for each of them, although the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, later assured that it was 8,400 euros for the entire trip. In any case, this is now about half that number of people.

The key to the fact that Italy only manages to transfer small groups to Albania lies in the stringent selection criteria, which greatly limited the final numbers and were already expected to hinder the entire plan, which was planned by the European The association is following with interest as he intends to repeat. Formula. The controversial expedited protocol of border detention and subsequent rejection of an asylum request can only be applied to male, adult and healthy migrants who were rescued in international waters by Italian flag vessels (for example, foreign non-governmental organizations Not by organizations). And, above all, they must come from one of the 19 countries that Italy considers safe, that respect human rights, which is why the authorities hope that it will reject their asylum applications and they can enter that accelerated protocol. Can.

However, this is where there is still a major hurdle, as according to EU criteria, only seven of those 19 countries can actually be classified as safe. This was established by a recent October decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union, on which the Court of Justice of Rome relied to reject the retention of the first migrants deported to Albania last month. The resolution argued that if basic rights are violated in any area in a country or any group is oppressed, the entire country should be considered unsafe. In this way, it excluded from the list the main countries coming to Italy by sea, such as Bangladesh, Egypt or Tunisia. In short, it made the entire Albania model useless.

The Meloni government reacted to the judicial setback with a decree law which, it argued, strengthened the obligation of magistrates to apply Italian rules, not European rules. On the contrary, the majority of experts and all judicial associations recall that in the event of conflict it is Community law that prevails. In view of the new legal conflict looming, last week a Bologna court, which had to decide on the asylum application, had already sent a question to the Luxembourg court to clarify what it should do. Amidst this clash between the government and the courts and European asylum standards, comes this second deportation.