A ruling by Italy's highest court reexamined the issue of repatriating migrants, even those who may have sought asylum in Italy, via the Italian detention centers located on Albanian soil.

Last week, Italy's highest appeals court, the Court of Cassation in Rome ruled that requests for international protection by migrants transferred to the Gjader repatriation center are not incompatible with detention in the center, according to the Italian broadsheet Il Corriere della Sera.

In an analysis of their ruling, the judges wrote that they believed: "It is legitimate to detain a foreign national in the facilities even after the presentation of the request since this center is the equivalent to all effects of the centers provided for by Article 14 of Decree Law 286/98."

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The case of a Moroccan national

The center at Gjader, thus, is considered the equivalent of any other center of this type on Italian soil. The case in question in this ruling was taken to an appeal by the interior ministry and concerns a 30-year-old Moroccan national who arrived on the island of Lampedusa in 2021.

The man had already been issued with a deportation order. Once transferred to the Gjader center in Albania alongside 39 other foreign nationals on April 11, the migrant filed a request for international protection.

In late April, the Rome Court of Appeals had in an eight-page ruling stated that the request was incompatible with his detention in the center, according to the Italy-Albania Memorandum of Understanding. That decision meant that the judge refused to authorize the Moroccan man's continued detention in the repatriation center and ordered his return to Italy.

At that point, the interior ministry decided to put the case to the highest court of appeals. Italy's highest court has now ordered the Court of Appeals to re-examine the case.

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Appealing the appeal

The migrant's lawyer, Salvatore Fachile, has said that he will fight against the decision.

"The Court of Cassation has upheld the claims of the interior minister, which however must be re-examined. We believe this ruling is a serious error and we will fight to ensure that the rights of these people be recognised," Fachile said.

Nevertheless, when Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi was interviewed by the journalist Franco Bechis, he said that "the centers in Albania are part of the solutions that are taking shape in discussions at the international and European levels and we will move forward" with them.

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Italy vows to press forward with Albania plan

Piantedosi added: "The number of migrant arrivals this year is around the same as those of last year. I do not like having to deviate these illegal migration flows towards other countries since we believe that the solutions should above all be at the European level, and I criticize the EU when it is not always up to the task of this mission. I repeat, I do not like this deviation," he said.

Piantedosi stressed that he believed firmness "works well when you bring together a series of initiatives and you make this understood to criminal organizations."

For the Italian Interior Minister, the Mediterranean route has just become too lucrative for traffickers. "In 2023, " Piantedosi continued, "we did the accounting and the revenue from the central Mediterranean corridor alone was a billion dollars. This was more or less equal to -- according to data from other sources -- a sixth, since world revenue [from human trafficking, Ed.] was considered to be between six and seven billion euros."

Piantedosi then referred back to the years 2018 and 2019 when his cabinet colleague Matteo Salvini was Interior Minister, saying that the results he achieved then in preventing migrant arrivals demonstrated that "using firmness has an effect." Piantedosi claimed that that year, Salvini and his government's policies had had "an extraordinary effect," and promised to continue to "move forward in this direction," with the Albania plan.

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