The special immigration unit of Rome's tribunal on Friday did not validate the detention of all 12 migrants who were taken Wednesday to a newly opened Italian hosting and repatriation centre in Gjader, Albania on the grounds that their countries of provenance, Bangladesh and Egypt, are not safe.
Premier Giorgia Meloni called the judges "prejudiced" an said it was up to the government, not the judiciary, to decide what a safe country was. She said a Monday cabinet meeting "will find a way to get around this obstacle".
The judges said the migrants must be taken back to Italy, and they are set to arrive back Saturday in Bari, from where they will probably be taken to an asylum seeker centre where they are expected to lodge appeals for asylum after their initial applications were rejected.
Four others who were taken with the group of 12 to Albania by the Italian navy vessel Libra on Wednesday were deemed unsuitable to stay after health screenings in Albania revealed that two were minors and another two were vulnerable.
The judges in particular ruled that "the denial to validate the detention in the facilities and areas of Albania, considered as Italian border or transit areas, is due to the impossibility of recognizing as 'safe countries' the States of provenance of the people held", a necessary precondition to implement accelerated border procedures provided for by the new Italian scheme.
The 12 will return to Italy on a navy ship Saturday, landing in Bari before being probably taken to an asylum seekers centre, local sources said.
Although their asylum applications have been rejected, the sources said, they have 14 days to appeal that decision.
Premier Giorgia Meloni's rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party slammed "the judicial Left", claiming leftwing magistrates were "helping" the parliamentary Left which has criticised the two new centres in Albania.
The centre left, along with rights groups, has said the new centres are needlessly expensive, with an estimated cost of some 800 million euros, and they allegedly unacceptably externalise the migrant issue creating a "new Guantanamo" while in fact processing a handful, 3,000 a year, of the well over 100,000 migrants that land in Italy annually.
But European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has hailed the scheme as a model other countries can follow, and Meloni said at an EU summit Thursday that she had received so many requests for information on it that "all of Europe is talking about the Italy-Albania model".
The FdI said on X Friday: "Absurd! The court does not validate the detention of migrants in Albania. The judicial left comes to the aid of the parliamentary left". The conservative party went on: "Some politicized magistrates have decided that there are no safe countries of origin: it is impossible to detain those who enter illegally, it is forbidden to repatriate illegal immigrants.
"They would like to abolish Italy's borders, we will not allow it".
Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa, a co-founder and bigwig in FdI, said his astonishment on the Rome court ruling rendered him incapable of commenting on it.
He told reporters: "I was very, very astonished. But I do not want to comment on it, because the astonishment surpasses any comment".
The FdI's main partner, Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini's rightwing League party, also slammed the ruling as "unacceptable".
"On the day of a hearing of the Open Arms trial against Matteo Salvini, the decision not validating the detention of immigrants in Albania is particularly unacceptable and grave", said the League in a note. "Pro-immigrant judges should run for election, but we know we will not be intimidated", said the note.
The leader of the third government party, centre-right post Berlusconi Forza Italia (FI) leader, Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said judges should not prevent the government from working.
"I am used to respecting the decisions of the judiciary but I would also like the decisions of the executive and legislative powers to be respected, because a democracy is based on the tripartite division of powers," said Tajani.
"The judiciary must apply the laws, not change them or prevent the executive from doing its job.
"Power always comes from the people, who chose this parliament and this government.
"The will of the people must always be respected. We will move forward with what President Von der Leyen said, for whom the agreement between Italy and Albania is a model to follow".
Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said the government would appeal the Rome ruling as far up as the supreme Court of Cassation.
"I have respect for the judges. We will fight the battle within the judicial mechanisms. A battle in the sense of affirmation in terms of international, European and national law. We will appeal and we will go all the way to the Supreme Court. Here the government's right to activate accelerated procedures is denied: doing in a month what otherwise takes three years", Piantedosi said.
Piantedosi vowed to press on with the scheme saying it will fulfill the predictions that it will be a model for other countries to emulate and will eventually become enshrined in European Union law.
"Not only will we move forward with the legal appeals but we will also move forward with these initiatives because from 2026 what Italy is doing in Albania, and not only, will become European law", he said.
Leaguers meanwhile staged a protest Friday in downtown Palermo to express solidarity with their leader Salvini after local prosecutors requested a six-year jail term for him on charges of abduction and refusal to perform public acts for refusing the disembarkation of 147 migrants rescued by the Spanish NGO Open Arms vessel for 19 days when he was interior minister five years ago.
Hungarian Premier Viktor Orban expressed support for Salvini saying he "deserves a medal".
Palermo prosecutor Giorgia Righi, who received several threats and insults on social media after requesting the six-year jail term for Salvini, has been assigned a security detail, judicial sources said Friday.
Giuseppe Santalucia, the head of the National Association of Magistrates (ANM), the judiciary's union, said that media tension and suspicions whipped up over a trial can produce verbal violence and threats.
Returning to the Albania scheme, Meloni said an inquiry to the European Commission presented by MEPs with the opposition Democratic Party (PD), Five-Star Movement (M5S) and Green and Left Alliance (AVS) "asking whether it intends to open an infringement procedure against Italy" over the agreement with Albania is a "shame that cannot pass unobserved.
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