The European Court of Justice ruled on Friday in favour of Italian judges who have blocked Italy from sending migrants to detention centres in Albania, in a blow to the government of Giorgia Meloni.
Meloni’s flagship plan to outsource migrant processing to a non-EU country and speed up repatriations of failed asylum seekers has been followed closely by other countries in the European Union. Italian magistrates have cited the European court’s decision that EU states cannot designate an entire country as ’safe’—thereby facilitating the repatriation of migrants—when certain regions of that country are not.
In its ruling published on Friday, the court did not contest Italy’s right to designate so-called “safe countries of origin,” as it has done. “However, a Member State may not include a country in the list of safe countries of origin if that country does not offer adequate protection to its entire population,” it ruled.
It furthermore said the sources of information on which the government’s ’safe country’ designation is based should be accessible both to the defendant and to courts. In the case considered by the court, the two Bangladeshi nationals taken to an Albanian migrant centre were denied the possibility of “challenging and reviewing the lawfulness of such a presumption of safety” by examining those sources.
“A Member State may not designate as a ‘safe’ country of origin a third country which does not satisfy, for certain categories of persons, the material conditions for such a designation,” it said.
Meloni and her Albanian counterpart Edi Rama signed the Albania migrant deal in November 2023. Under the plan, Italy would finance and operate the centres designed to fast-track the processing of migrants from ’safe’ countries, and therefore unlikely to be eligible for asylum. A series of migrants have been sent to the centres, beginning in October 2024, but they have been promptly sent back to Italy after judges ruled they did not meet the criteria to be detained there.
Italy responded by modifying its ‘safe’ list, but judges ruled twice more against subsequent detentions and referred the issue to the ECJ. The court noted, however that European law will change in June 2026, allowing “exceptions for such clearly identifiable categories of persons.”
