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ROME (Reuters) - A Rome court on Friday rejected orders to detain a group of migrants in a reception facility in Albania and said they had a right to be brought to Italy, dealing a blow to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's plan to divert asylum-seekers abroad.
This week, a total of 16 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean and taken to Albania by an Italian navy ship, becoming the first group of people to be housed in the new facility of Gjader after being processed in the Shengjin port.
Four of them have already been brought to Italy for health reasons or because they were recognised as minors.
"The refusal to validate detentions in Albanian structures and areas...is due to the impossibility of recognising the states of origin of the detained persons as safe countries," court president Luciana Sangiovanni said in a statement, adding the migrants had therefore "a right to be brought to Italy".
Arturo Salerni, a lawyer involved in the case, told Reuters the decision applied to all the 12 remaining migrants.
Only migrants coming from a list of 22 nations Italy classified as safe can be sent to Albania. Egypt and Bangladesh are among them but a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the matter made it impossible to hold them in Albania, the statement said.
Ruling on a separate case involving the Czech Republic, the ECJ said a country outside the bloc cannot be declared safe unless its entire territory is deemed free of danger, limiting the definition of what might be considered a safe country outside the EU.
"The detentions were not validated in application of the principles, binding on national courts and the Administration itself, set out in the recent ECJ ruling," court president Sangiovanni said.
The decision provoked the ire of Meloni's Brothers of Italy party.
"Some politicised magistrates have decided that there are no safe countries of origin," the party wrote on its profile on X.
"They would like to abolish Italy's borders, we will not allow it," the party said.
Charity group Sea Watch applauded the court decision, saying the "whole media show organised by the Meloni government" had clashed with national and international law.
(Reporting by Marco Carta and Angelo Amante, editing by Alessandro Parodi and Angus MacSwan)
