There are still 7 asylum seekers brought to Albania today by Libra. One of the 8 selected for the accelerated border procedure - 3 Egyptians and 5 Bangladeshis - was found to be vulnerable due to health problems during the thorough medical screening carried out upon arrival this morning at the port of Shengjin.
He will then be transferred to Brindisi aboard the same Navy ship. His fellow passengers will remain in the Gjader center, awaiting the decision of the Roman judges on the validation of the detention. The verdict will be within 48 hours.
After the controversies of the last few weeks, the president of the ANM, Giuseppe Santalucia, hopes that "the jurisdiction can work peacefully. The magistrates do their job and there is no invasion of the field". Even the second episode of the Albanian operation set up by the government, therefore, does not start off on the right foot.
On its first trip, Libra brought 16 migrants to Shengjin on October 16. Four of them failed screening (2 vulnerable and two minors) and immediately headed for Italy. The other 12 were freed two days later by magistrates from the immigration section of the Rome court.
As per the Italy-Albania agreement, the 8 were intercepted in international waters south of Lampedusa and brought to the Libra last Monday.
On the patrol boat they were subjected to a pre-screening to verify that they met the requirements set by the regulations: adult males, not vulnerable and coming from one of the 19 safe countries. They remained on the ship for 5 days before arriving in Shengjin.
The group disembarked from the Italian patrol boat in the morning. All in black overalls with a purple band on the chest provided on board, flip-flops and plastic bags with their few belongings in hand. First stop was the hotspot set up at the port, where the Italian medical team carried out more thorough tests on the foreigners, which revealed vulnerabilities in one of them that made it inadvisable to stay in Albanian territory.
An Italian parliamentary delegation and representatives of associations from the Asylum and Immigration Committee are present on site on a monitoring mission to verify the conditions of the centers: living spaces, toilets, access to open spaces, compliance with legal and international procedures, including the possibility for migrants to choose a lawyer and receive information in their own language, the legitimacy of the selection and detention process.
The Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, continues to defend the operation and announces new appeals in view of possible new rejections of the detentions. "We - he states - are convinced that everything is in accordance with European law. The judicial processes are long and complex. There are judges who are ruling in a certain way, we do not agree with these rulings, we have appealed them, we will appeal again if we do not agree with other provisions and then we will reach a point in which each trial reaches a final third degree that will establish".
The wait is for the Court of Cassation, which on December 4 will decide on a request put forward by the Roman judges to decide whether they can maintain a certain discretion in the evaluation of a safe country or whether they will simply have to stick to the list of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (now in the one contained in the new decree law of last October 21).
(Online Union)
