Giorgia Meloni seems to have hit a dead end with the Albania operation to discourage landings. Below I’ll explain why. But also because it is legitimate that his government has the duty to combat irregular immigration. The most comical aspect of this story, which is dividing the entire Italian politics over the fate of twelve people (12), are the criticisms, accusations and complaints coming from the opposition. Starting with the Democratic Party and its secretary Elly Schlein.

In particular due to the danger that the Egyptian citizens fished out of the sea, transferred to the new center in Albania and brought to Italy by order of the Court of Rome, will be sent home. In fact, Egypt is not considered a safe country by the left. While for the Ministry of the Interior and for a good part of the European Union states it is. So let’s see what the Democratic Party did when it was in government.

The left-wing “collecting” when Giulio Regeni was killed

On 25 January 2016, the Italian researcher Giulio Regeni was kidnapped and tortured by the Egyptian secret services. He is working in Cairo on a study on trade union movements. The body was thrown along a road and discovered on February 3. He is so swollen from torture that his mother will recognize him by the tip of his nose (in the photo below, a demonstration in front of the Egyptian embassy in Rome).

What else would it take to demonstrate that Egypt is not a safe state? That year the Democratic Party was in government with two prime ministers: Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni. And that same year, Italy carried out “12 collecting-type operations for a total of 508 repatriated Egyptian citizens” (Report to the Chamber of the Guarantor for the Rights of Persons Deprived of Personal Liberty). Collecting is the forced repatriation activity through which, on the twelve flights chartered by the Ministry of the Interior, immigrants are handed over directly to the Egyptian police on board the plane. Adding the ordinary repatriations, the Pd government sent 691 people back to Egypt in 2016, in addition to the 667 brought back to Cairo the year before by Matteo Renzi.

Hundreds deported by plane even during the pandemic

In 2017 the Gentiloni government (in the photo below, with Elly Schlein at the conference “For a sustainable concrete human Europe”) re-established diplomatic relations with the Egyptian regime of Abdel Fattah Al Sisi: the decision, announced on 14 August when Italy is on holiday, allows the return to Cairo of the Italian ambassador, who had been withdrawn in protest against Al Sisi’s lack of collaboration in the investigation into the Regeni murder. Despite the difficulties in Italy-Egypt relations, the Egyptians repatriated by the new Pd government are still 307. In the same period Gentiloni even reaches an agreement with the Libyan government: a pact that delivers the asylum seekers stopped at sea to torture in the brutal detention centers in Libya .

Let’s skip the 14 months of the 5Star-League government: 294 Egyptians repatriated in 2018 and 363 in 2019, numbers which however also include the months in which the center-left governs. In fact, the forced return does not stop even in the months of the pandemic, when the Democratic Party with the 5 Stars is once again in government: 91 Egyptians repatriated in 2020 and 269 in 2021, despite knowing that the health conditions in Egypt are terrible.

The double standard of Elly Schlein’s party against the center-right

The last charter flight to Cairo organized by Pd-5Stelle is on 29 April 2022, five months before the new elections. In all, more than two thousand Egyptians have been returned by the centre-left to the regime from which they had fled. With what modesty then does Elly Schlein and her party accuse Giorgia Meloni of endangering the lives of asylum seekers today?

We had already explained (here) why the current government’s Albania operation, with the creation of repatriation centers and the outsourcing of identification procedures, would have been of little use. And it cost a lot. The intent is to exploit the so-called rejection at the border, which involves quicker times than what would happen with the presence of asylum seekers on Italian territory. The fact that the Court of Rome has so far neutralized the operation should however reassure those who feared the failure to respect constitutional rights and the violation of international norms.

Because the Court of Justice displaces the Italian government

When she was advised in view of the Albania operation, Giorgia Meloni could not foresee the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 4 October 2024 (C 406/22): the new rule redefines the duties of the judiciary. The decision, triggered by the case of a Moldovan citizen who had requested asylum in the Czech Republic, reiterates that “when a court is seized with an appeal against a decision rejecting an application for international protection… this court must ex officio raise, on the basis of the elements taken from the file and those brought to his attention during the proceedings, the question of the violation of the material conditions”.

In other words, if a country is defined as safe, but the judge believes that the authority of that country is not able to protect that individual asylum seeker, the judge must raise the issue ex officio and decide accordingly. It is a mistake to consider all this a political activity by the judiciary against the government. No national law could annul a superior norm established by the Court of Justice of the European Union, as Minister Carlo Nordio had announced.

Lawyer Tambasco: the EU law is worth more than Italian laws

“In the current institutional structure, characterized by a multiplicity of regulatory systems (international, European, national, regional) intertwined in a sort of network – the lawyer Domenico Tambasco explains to uisjournal.com – ​​to state that judges are subject only to the law Italian law would cost a first-year constitutional law student a failing grade. On the contrary, it is well known that judges today must respect the principle of the primacy of community law, whereby the principles of law contained in the laws of the European Union and in the judgments of the Court of Justice themselves are binding: so much so as to force the non-application of the law national possibly in conflict with these principles”.

The three detention facilities in Gjader, 77 kilometers south of Tirana, according to the Italian government’s announcement, should host 36 thousand migrants a year, 3 thousand a month: the 880-place center for the detention of asylum seekers, the for repatriation of 114 and a detention center with 20 places. Cost of the plan 653 million to be borne by Italy to be spent over 5 years, 130.6 million per year. The costs of transporting asylum seekers on Navy ships must then be added. A large part of the sum is intended to pay the travel allowances of police and ministry officials in Albania: 252 million. Obtaining the daily expenditure per capita from these figures, however, we discover that each place costs the Italian State just under 10 euros per migrant per day. Less than half of what it would cost in Italy (in the photo below, the Libra patrol vessel of the Italian Navy with which the first 16 migrants were transferred to Albania).

Fake news about money: hosting in Albania costs half as much as in Italy

For the operation of the Cara di Gradisca d’Isonzo in Friuli Venezia Giulia, a structure very similar to the Albanian one, the prefecture of Trieste in 2022 has in fact established a procurement base of 22 euros per day per guest, more or less the price paid throughout Italy. And for the repatriation center, even 42 euros per day per guest. For the infinite network of cooperatives that manage reception in Italy, this year alone the 55 thousand asylum seekers who have landed since January 1st therefore guarantee a potential turnover of one million and 200 thousand euros per day. Contracts which, especially in the South, ensure the salary of hundreds of Italian employees.

Collapse of landings: co-ops lose 65 percent of their takings

The suspicion is that the controversies of these days are not just a question of solidarity: in 2023 157,652 landed in Italy, this year (at the date of this article) almost three times less. In other words, potential hospitality revenues have collapsed by 65 percent. Unforeseeable external factors probably matter. But also the right decision of the Meloni government to allow 452 thousand foreign citizens to regularly enter Italy by 2025 for seasonal, non-seasonal and self-employed work: 136 thousand in 2023, 151 thousand in 2024 and 165 thousand next year.

People who will not have to pay Libyan smugglers or even be hosted by the hospitality business paid for by the Italian state. But only if the Albanian centers operate at full capacity will the operation not be a waste of public money: this is the dead end in which Giorgia Meloni is obliged not to fail.

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