Court rejects Italy's Albania program

A Rome court decision to outlaw outsourcing asylum-seeker processing in Albania in the so-called "return hubs" has dealt a huge blow to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and many other European Union leaders.

The Rome Court's immigration unit ruled on Friday that migrants sent to Albania by Italy cannot be detained and also cannot be released in Albania. Instead, they will be vetted in Italy for asylum eligibility or potentially sent back to their countries of origin.

According to the ruling, the first batch of 12 migrants, from Bangladesh and Egypt, were returned to Italy on Saturday from the newly opened asylum processing centers in Albania, just three days after their arrival.

The court decision was based on concerns about the safety of the migrants in their home countries.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi vowed on Friday he would appeal the court ruling.

Meloni criticized the ruling by saying that deeming countries such as Bangladesh and Egypt unsafe means that virtually all migrants would be barred from the Albania program.

She said during a trip to Lebanon she would convene a cabinet meeting to address the issue on Monday.

"We will meet to approve some norms that will allow us to overcome this obstacle," she said.

"I believe it's up to the government and not magistrates to establish which countries can be considered safe."

Meloni has touted the return hubs as a model for other EU members to follow.

Italy and Albania reached a deal in February last year in which Albania agreed to receive up to 36,000 male migrants intercepted in international waters each year in its two processing centers for asylum-seekers in northern Albania.

The centers received the first batch of 16 migrants who arrived on an Italian navy ship on Wednesday, but four were rejected by the centers because of health and young age concerns.

Against international law

"Respect for international law, human rights and dignity must be the pillars of any measure to address migration challenges," Iratxe Garcia Perez, a Spanish MEP and president of the Group of the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, said on X after the court ruling on Friday.

"The return hubs are clearly against those principles and now it's confirmed by the court of Rome."

At their summit in Brussels on Thursday, EU leaders called for urgent new legislation to increase and accelerate migrant returns.

"The European Council calls for determined action at all levels to facilitate, increase and speed up returns from the European Union," the EU leaders wrote in conclusions of the summit. They asked the European Commission to submit new legislation.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in a major shift to the right, has endorsed the "return hub" concept by describing it as an example of "out-of-box thinking" in dealing with the migration into the bloc.

"Today, we see that from all those that have no right to stay in the European Union, only 20 percent of those who have a return decision are really returned to their countries of origin," von der Leyen told a news conference after the summit.

"The idea (of return hubs) … is not trivial but it has been discussed."

However, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz dismissed the idea of return hubs, saying they were not a viable answer to the migration challenges of a large country.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said, "All these solutions of 'migration hubs', as they are called, have never shown in the past to be very effective, and they are always very expensive."

Agencies contributed to the story.