The Italian government on Monday approved a new law aimed at overcoming legal obstacles to the implementation of the controversial agreement with Albania on migrants.<\/p>\n
According to the new decree, which came into force immediately, the Italian government has shortened the list of countries it considers safe. Migrants who do not gain asylum status will not be deported to unsafe countries.<\/p>\n
The number of countries that Italy considers safe has now been reduced to 19, from 22 previously. Cameroon, Colombia and Nigeria are excluded from the list.<\/p>\n
The decision was taken after the court in Rome overturned the detention order for the first 12 migrants sent to the migrant reception center in Albania. The court ruled that their countries of origin, Bangladesh and Egypt, were not safe places for their return. After the court’s decision, the migrants returned to Italy, where they can reapply for asylum, VOA writes.<\/p>\n
The government decided to make the change a statutory act, rather than a government decision, thus making it more difficult to block it in court.<\/p>\n
“The law is in accordance with the decisions of the European Court of Justice. So we removed from the original list three countries, which during the evaluation showed that there are problems in parts of their territory that do not allow us to consider them completely safe”, said the Italian Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi.<\/p>\n
The Rome court’s decision was motivated in particular by a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice, which ruled that a country can only be considered safe for the return of migrants if the entire territory of that country is safe.<\/p>\n
The blockage by the Italian courts became the first legal obstacle to the five-year agreement between Albania and Italy for the temporary housing of about 3,000 migrants a month, who are caught at sea by the Italian coast guard.<\/p>\n
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has defended the agreement reached with Albania as a “model” of how to treat illegal migrants, and the new legal change tries to preserve this image.<\/p>\n
“We arrived at this point, since everything originated from a decision of the European Court of Justice, which is very complex and very well-articulated and perhaps not understood and read properly,” said the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio.<\/p>\n
Human rights organizations and activist groups in the Mediterranean have criticized the Italy-Albania agreement as a dangerous precedent that violates international laws. Some legal experts also point out that even the latest changes by the Italian government will not be able to provide solutions to future legal conflicts, as EU decisions prevail over the laws of member states.<\/p>\n
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The Italian government on Monday approved a new law aimed at overcoming legal obstacles to the implementation of the controversial agreement with Albania on migrants. According to the new decree, which came into force immediately, the Italian government has shortened the list of countries it considers safe. Migrants who do not gain asylum status will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":72634,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[153,1803],"tags":[150,243,151],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n