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".
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