>>>ANSA/Navy ship to resume Albania-deal operations next wk

(ANSA) - ROME, NOV 2 - The Libra, the Italian Navy ship tasked with operations regarding the government's controversial agreement to run migrant-centres on Albanian territory, will return to the central Mediterranean next week, sources said on Saturday, confirming newspaper reports.
    The ship had been docked in Messina after a Rome court failed to validate the detention of 12 migrants who were part of the first group to be taken to Albania under the deal.
    The court rejected the migrants' detention at a centre in Gjader on the grounds that their countries of provenance, Bangladesh and Egypt, could not be considered safe.
    As a result the 12 migrants had to be taken to Italy.
    The government has since passed a measure setting a list of 19 safe countries for repatriation, including Bangladesh and Egypt, in order to overcome the legal hurdle to the agreement being applied.
    The Libra will return to the central Mediterranean on Monday or Tuesday and monitor the flow of migrants, take any that get picked up on board and organise a possible new transfer to the Shengjin hotspot in Albania, the sources said.
    Premier Giorgia Meloni has said the project, agreed with centre-left Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, will deter migrants from setting off for Italy and Europe.
    Critics have said it unacceptably externalises the migrant issue, is excessively expensive and addressing just a drop in the ocean of migrants heading for Italy.
    British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who binned the previous Conservative government's scheme to take migrants to Rwanda, and Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp have been among the foreign officials who have voiced interest in the project, which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has held up as a model for others to follow.
    The Italian Criminal Lawyers Association, meanwhile, on Saturday defended the Bologna judges who referred a new government measure defining a list of safe countries for repatriation to the European Court of Justice, a move that sparked accusations that the judiciary was encroaching the political realm.
    "The Court of Bologna moved with particular prudence by placing its requests within the correct supranational and national normative and jurisprudential parameters," said the association's president Francesco Petrelli.
    "It is frankly impossible to see the choice of a preliminary interlocution with the Court of Justice, as an attack on politics".
    On Friday Giuseppe Santalucia, the president of magistrates union ANM, said the Italian judiciary is unable to work with serenity because of repeated claims from members of the ruling coalition that some of its decisions are politically motivated.
    Santalucia singled out Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini for criticism after the minister hit out at a Bologna court's referral.
    "On Monday I will be in Bologna for an extraordinary assembly, which testifies the climate of unease about this way of doing politics, about the media close to the current governing majority, which stops magistrates from working in serenity," Santalucia told La7 television.
    "You cannot do anything without getting labelled afterwards as being politicized magistrates.
    "You make a decision that is not liked and you become a 'Red'.
    "This is unacceptable.
    "I ask Minister Salvini what is inappropriate about a measure that asks the EU court of justice for a ruling on compliance".
    (ANSA).