How Italy and Albania Want now Sorting the Boat People from Africa into “Good” and “Bad”

The first voyage of the planned hub ship, bringing migrants in Albania, could also being the last. Now some judges may block everything. The navy is ready to be stationed in the waters in front of the southern island of Lampedusa. But an E.U. court ruling coud force the Italian government of Meloni to revise the official list of safe countries.

Now that the long wait is over, the Italian government wants to run. And it pulls straight on “Operation Albania”, flaunted for months, which however could sink just a few miles from the start. The migrant ship's first voyage across the Ionian and Adriatic could turn out to be a flop.

And the danger for the Italian executive is not only of finding empty those centers that will cost nearly billons of euros over the next five years, but also of witnessing a complaint of fiscal damages.

The operational timetable for the experiment of extraterritorial detention of migrants, which was communicated to all the actors involved in the Italy-Albania agreement, works like this:

The 300-seater navy ship could set sail these days and still be stationed starting tomorrow morning about 20 miles off the coast of Lampedusa. All migrants rescued in the coming hours by the Coast Guard in international waters but in the Italian zone will be brought onto the vessel.

The Navy ship could theoretically float indefinitely because it is true that there are five or six planned trips each month, but it will have to wait each time for it to fill up at least partially, and this depends on the frequency of the trips and the capacity of the barges that set sail in search of a future, where they come from, the sea conditions and the frailties on board.

In fact, the ship will function as a hub:

An initial screening will be carried out on it to exclude women, minors, tortured people, and the sick, who will be disembarked in Lampedusa and from there put into the normal reception circuit while waiting for their asylum requests to be screened by the territorial commissions. A sort of selective disembarkation this time identifies an alternative destination for the others: Albania, precisely.

Adult men whose provenance from one of the 22 countries deemed safe by the list tweaked just this year by the Italian government will be ascertained by cultural mediators already on board will be taken out of Italy. And here it comes back to the timing, and the race: The first departure of the mega-ship has been envisioned for next Wednesday.

Once they arrive at the port of Schengjin, in northern Albania near the border with Montenegro, the remaining migrants will be disembarked and subjected in the hotspot to a second, more thorough screening. They will then be transferred to Gjader, a former Albanian Air Force site some 20 kilometers inland, where there are three facilities delivered only on Oct. 9 to the Italian Interior Ministry for testing: an 880-seat asylum-seeker detention center (of which only 400, less than half, are ready to date), a 144-seat Cpr and a small 20-seat penitentiary.

It is here, in this mega facility, that migrants subject to fast-track border procedures would be detained with a detention order signed by Rome's quaestor that must be validated within 48 hours by the judges of Rome's immigration section while waiting for a decision within four weeks on the likely rejection of their asylum claims. And it is always here that the Albania plan runs up against the ruling issued on Oct. 4 by the European Court of Justice that undermines the foundations of the entire agreement by making it, in essence, unenforceable.

What the Luxembourg judges are saying is that a country, to be defined as safe, must not resort to “persecution, torture or other inhuman treatment” in any of its areas and for any person. A very different criterion from that of the Italian government, which is now forcing Italy to completely revise its list by cutting off, for example, Tunisia, Egypt or Bangladesh from which most asylum seekers arrive.

In practice just Cape Verdeans would remain imprisoned in Albania before their swift repatriation. If the judges, alerted to decide as early as next weekend, comply with the European ruling – as seems inevitable, and as has already happened in Palermo where some requests for validation for the detention of Tunisian nationals have just been rejected – practically none of the migrants can be locked up in Albania. And they will have to be returned to Italy.

This is the knot that threatens to blow up everything, taking away the legal basis of the whole operation planned by Meloni’s Italy. It is not the only one. Other appeals could rain down on the vulnerability assessment of the migrants aboard the hub ship, which will necessarily have to be fast. There is also the thorny issue of legal protection with only remote lawyers and only video-conference connections for validation hearings.