Italy moves to replace courts that ruled against its migrant detentions

By Angelo Amante

ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s right-wing coalition has passed rules to change the courts responsible for validating the detention of migrants, in what the opposition said was a vendetta against judges who recently blocked a plan to send asylum seekers to Albania.

The Albanian facilities are a key pillar of the government’s policy to crack down on illegal arrivals and speed up repatriations.

The move comes against a backdrop of tensions between Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government and the judiciary, after migration judges issued orders to bring to Italy people being held in the Albanian camps.

Under a proposal approved by a parliamentary committee late on Wednesday, future rulings on migrant detentions would pass from the migrant judges to Italy’s regular appeal courts.

The plan still requires final approval in parliament, where the government has a comfortable majority.

“It is a clear (act of) revenge against those who … refused to bend to requests that violate the principles of law,” lawmakers from the opposition Democratic Party (PD) said in a statement.

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party said the aim of the shift was to promote efficiency, while transferring to a higher court an issue related to human rights.

Italy believes holding migrants from a list of countries deemed as safe in camps outside the European Union will act as a deterrent to others considering making the dangerous sea crossing to reach the continent.

However the Italian judges – basing their decision on an October ruling by the European Union’s Court of Justice (ECJ) under which no nation of origin could be considered safe if even part of its territory is dangerous – said the migrants held in Albania had to be brought to Italy.

The issue not only enraged Meloni but also sparked tension between Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Elon Musk. Mattarella told the U.S. billionaire to quit meddling in Italian affairs after he said judges who questioned the government’s plan needed “to go”.

The PD lawmakers called the new rules a “Musk amendment” aimed at disempowering judges and said that was a “dark page” for the Italian parliament.

(Reporting by Angelo Amante, editing by Gavin Jones and and Toby Chopra)