di Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo
1. The European Pact on Migration and Asylum combines the external dimension of border controls, involving third countries, with a new internal dimension, based on greater powers for national states to control internal borders and a significant reduction in the right to protection for people from safe third countries. Bilateral or multilateral agreements cannot establish forced return practices or interceptions in international waters that result in the arbitrary and violent detention of persons and their subjection to all kinds of abuses. Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties prohibits this.
2. The policy objectives set out by Brussels conceal the true substance of Europe’s border control externalization policies. Among the measures to be adopted vis-à-vis third countries, the European Union agrees to legislate for: “strengthened actions and cross-cutting activities in the external dimension of migration”; “increased diplomatic and political outreach”; “coordinated communication strategies”; “support effective, human rights-based migration policies in third countries”; and “promote legal migration and well-managed mobility, including by strengthening bilateral, regional, and international partnerships on migration, forced displacement, legal pathways, and mobility partnerships.”
3. In 2024, the European Union approved the European Pact on Migration and Asylum: a package of 10 measures (9 Regulations and 1 Directive) that defines a radical reform of the overall European asylum system (CEAS). This restructuring introduces elements that risk entering into strong tension with the fundamental rights framework and the principles enshrined in the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees.
– EU Reception Conditions Directive (EU 2024/1346) on the reception conditions for refugees and asylum seekers
– Regulation (EU) 2024/1351 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 on asylum and migration management, amending Regulations (EU) 2021/1147 and (EU) 2021/1060 and repealing Regulation (EU) No 604/2013
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1359 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 addressing situations of crisis and force majeure in the field of migration and asylum and amending Regulation (EU) 2021/1147
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1358 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 on the establishment of ‘Eurodac’ for the comparison of biometric data in order to effectively apply Regulations (EU) 2024/1351 and (EU) 2024/1350 of the European Parliament and of the Council and Council Directive 2001/55/EC and to identify illegally staying third-country nationals and stateless persons and on requests for the comparison with Eurodac data by Member States’ law enforcement authorities and Europol for law enforcement purposes, amending Regulations (EU) 2018/1240 and (EU) 2019/818 of the European Parliament and of the Council and repealing Regulation (EU) No 603/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1356 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 introducing the screening of third-country nationals at the external borders and amending Regulations (EC) No 767/2008, (EU) 2017/2226, (EU) 2018/1240 and (EU) 2019/817
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1348 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 establishing a common procedure for international protection in the Union and repealing Directive 2013/32/EU
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1359 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 addressing situations of crisis and force majeure in the field of migration and asylum and amending Regulation (EU) 2021/1147
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1349 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 establishing a return border procedure, and amending Regulation (EU) 2021/1148
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1350 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 establishing a Union Resettlement and Humanitarian Admission Framework, and amending Regulation (EU) 2021/1147
–Regulation (EU) 2024/1347 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 on standards for the qualification of third-country nationals or stateless persons as beneficiaries of international protection, for a uniform status for refugees or for persons eligible for subsidiary protection and for the content of the protection granted, amending Council Directive 2003/109/EC and repealing Directive 2011/95/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council
4. The Migration and Asylum Pact provides for a system threatening the right to asylum in the European Union and allowing massive human rights violations in Europe just because of their migrant status. Put together, those new regulations will serve as the backbone for a new system of “migration management” within the EU, based on:
- De facto detention at the border with no exception for families with children, regardless of their age, fast track procedures with lower standards for asylum request proceedings in lieu of a complete and fair examination of the requests, as well as an emphasis on deportations with less protection;
- Lots of asylum seekers will end up stuck in procedures at the border, while the introduction of the “non-entry” legal fiction will have them considered as not on EU ground, thus allowing inferior standards to apply and raising the risk of human rights violations and push-backs at the border. Even unaccompanied minors could be detained during these border procedures if considered as a « threat to national security or public order ». Morever, experience has shown that detaining people en masse at the border for extended periods of time only leads to overpopulated and inhumane conditions, as seen in the Greek islands;
- Because of the “safe third country” concept extension, people requesting asylum will see admissibility of their claim denied more often and be deported out of the EU on the basis of loose connection links, also raising the risk of push-backs.
The designation of safe countries of origin at Union level occurs when this country guarantees effective protection and has ratified and complies with the Geneva Convention within the limits of the derogations or limitations provided for by that country, authorised under the Convention. Therefore, this designation, as expressly provided, “is without prejudice to the provision of Regulation (EU) 2024/1348 according to which Member States may apply the concept of safe country of origin only provided that applicants cannot provide elements justifying why the concept of safe country of origin is not applicable to them, within the framework of an individual assessment. In this context, particular attention should be paid to applicants who are in a specific situation in such countries, such as LGBTIQ people, victims of gender-based violence, human rights defenders, religious minorities and journalists”.
EU Court of Justice has already signalled that governments do not have unlimited room to manoeuvre. In Alace and Canpelli, delivered last August, it held that a member state may designate a country as a “safe country of origin” by legislative act only if that designation remains open to effective judicial review, and only if the underlying sources are accessible to both the applicant and the reviewing court. It also made clear that a member state may not place a country on such a list if that country does not offer adequate protection to its entire population.
6. Frontex EU Regulation No. 656/2014, which will remain in force even after the entry into force of the Regulations provided for in the Pact on Migration and Asylum, expressly provides for the recognition of all international conventions on the law of the sea, and compliance with the Geneva Convention on Refugees
EU Regulation No. 1896/2019 renames the Frontex agency the European Border and Coast Guard and strengthens its autonomous negotiating capabilities in relation to third countries, for the surveillance of external borders and for the effective implementation of repatriation operations with forced accompaniment. The same Regulation establishes Eurosur “as an integrated framework for the exchange of information and operational cooperation within the European Border and Coast Guard in order to improve situational knowledge and increase responsiveness for border management purposes, including in order to identify, prevent and combat illegal immigration and cross-border crime and help ensure the protection and salvation of migrants’ lives”. The setting up and deployment of the Frontex Standing Corps is taking place gradually and will reach 10,000 members by 2027. Frontex staff has also been deployed at the EU external borders, and in the context of four Status Agreements with Moldova, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania,Frontex has been able to deploy staff in these countries.
In cooperating with third country authorities, “the Agency acts within the Union’s external action policy, including with reference to the protection of fundamental rights and personal data, the principle of non-refoulement, the prohibition of arbitrary detention and the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. The same limits apply to Member States hosting the agency’s means or coordinating with it.
7. It is not at all true that Italy has achieved success with the new Asylum and Migration Management Regulation, amending Regulations (EU) 2021/1147 and (EU) 2021/1060 and repealing Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 (Dublin III) . According to this new Regulation,
“Member States have full discretion as to the type of solidarity to which they contribute. No Member State will ever be obliged to carry out relocations”. Only economic compensation is provided for first-entry countries when other member countries refuse to implement relocation decisions. And the extension to three years of the minimum period of stay in a country of second entry, before this country becomes responsible for examining asylum applications, could penalize Italy, which will be forced to accept the readmission of thousands of asylum seekers who have passed through other European Union countries after disembarking or being rescued at sea.
8. The designated targets of these European and national(istic) policies will be the right to asylum and the principle of non-discrimination, recognized both in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and in the National Constitutions, in Italy in Articles 2, 3 and 10 of the Italian Constitution, which will nevertheless remain a barrier against the application of what is provided for at European level by the new Pact on Migration and Asylum, when it comes to adopting secondary national legislation and applying the resulting administrative practices.
9. By 408 votes in favor, 184 against, and 60 abstentions, the EU Parliament amended the previous Rules of Procedure (EU) 2024/1348 to establish an EU list of safe countries of origin. Accelerated procedures, not only at the border, will therefore be imposed for asylum seekers from Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Kosovo, India, Morocco and Tunisia. EU candidate countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey) are also designated as safe countries of origin at Union level, unless there is a situation of international or internal armed conflict in the country, restrictive measures affecting fundamental rights and freedoms have been adopted or the percentage of positive decisions taken by Member State authorities towards applicants from the country is more than 20%. EU Parliament also approved the Regulation on the application of the concept of a safe third country, amending the Asylum Procedures Regulation (EU) 2024/1348, by 396 votes to 226, with 30 abstentions.
On 26 March 2026, EU Parliament approved a new common system for the expulsion of third-country nationals without the right to reside in the EU (known as the ‘Return Regulation’), repealing the 2008 Return Directive. A new instrument that effectively annihilates the rights of migrant people and continues to dismantle EU law, and, by extension, international law.
10. Current European Union law, as interpreted by the EU Court of Justice “prevents a Member State from designating as a safe country of origin a third country that does not satisfy, for certain categories of persons, the substantive conditions of such designation”. The Court of Justice has also confirmed the possibility that an EU Member State may establish a list of safe countries of origin through an act having the force of law, specifying however that sufficient and adequate access to information sources must be guaranteed “…” on which this designation is based“and which the judge has the power to assess whether it complies with the legal criteria set out in European law; in carrying out this assessment, he or she may rely on multiple sources different from those followed by the Administration provided, on the one hand, that he or she is satisfied with the reliability of such information and, on the other, that he or she guarantees the parties involved compliance with the adversarial principle. For this reason, it is necessary to guarantee the effective exercise of the rights of defense and to highlight the individual condition not only of asylum seekers, but of all persons who, also under national legislation (in Italy pursuant to art. 5.6 of TU immigration 286/98), after the execution of the forced removal, will still be vulnerable following repatriation.
11. Under EU Regulation 2024/1349 (return border procedure) “a third-country national or stateless person whose application has been rejected under the asylum procedure at the border is not authorised to enter the territory of the Member State concerned”, and Member States may require the denied asylum seeker to be held for a period not exceeding 12 weeks “in a place located at or near the external border or in a transit area. Where it is unable to welcome the person in one of those places, the Member State may have recourse to other places on its territory”. If a return decision cannot be executed within this maximum period, “the States members continue return procedures in accordance with Directive (return) 2008/115/EC”.
12. After the entry into force of this new Return Regulation, it will be possible to send denigrated asylum seekers who have received a final expulsion decision, even at the same time as the denial, to a third country, based on a bilateral agreement or concluded at EU level. But there will still remain judicial guarantees and rights of defence which cannot be erased, and the European Union itself will have to express its opinion on individual bilateral agreements, in an attempt to achieve uniform criteria for negotiation with third countries, agreed criteria which today appear to be very distant, even for purely economic reasons.
Without new readmission agreements with third countries and with countries of origin, and without their effective implementation, which is certainly not on the horizon, outside already existing bilateral relations, the number of people in conditions of irregularity effectively removed from Italian, and European, territory, does not seem likely to increase. Perhaps the Ministry of the Interior could also stop releasing untrue data on the “successes” achieved in increasing the number of people subject to a refoulement or expulsion order and repatriated.
13. The category of safe third countries should not be confused with the model of return centres (return hubs), which Italy has sought to outsource under theItaly-Albania Protocol.
The “Albania model”, in addition to the very few shipwrecked asylum seekers rescued in international waters by Italian naval vessels, which was the original provision, after Legislative Decree 37/2025, later converted into Law 75/2025, should also apply to irregular migrants whose applications have already been rejected and whose objective is their repatriation, to a country other than the one in which the centre is located, which should in fact function as a sort of transit station. So much so that the few repatriations of people detained in the Gjader center last year were carried out from Italy, not Albania. European legislation on safe third countries, on the other hand, applies to asylum seekers and aims at their readmission to the third country from which they have transited, either on the basis of specific bilateral agreements or at European Union level.
If individual regulatory aspects of the new Regulations are to be voted on “anticipated”, before they enter into force, if cases of informal and arbitrary detention at the border, and in places which, with a legal fiction, are assimilated to the border (with the fiction of non-entry in the new Screening Regulation), for which Italy has already been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, multiply there will be more appeals and there will be more convictions by the International Tribunals and Courts.
The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) has pronounced on issues related to transit zones and the fiction of non-entry. In 2020, the CJEU delivered its judgment in joined cases FMS and others, confirming that holding asylum-seekers in transit zones at the external border constitutes detention. The CJEU emphasised that such detention must be necessary and proportionate, be subject to a formal decision, include a possibility for judicial review and not go beyond the border procedure as defined by the Asylum Procedures Directive.
14. The creation of return centres (hubs) outside the EU is therefore not yet contained in an immediately applicable piece of legislation, but will have to be the subject of further decisions leading to the adoption of the new Return Regulation. Only then will the European Union introduce a new common system for returns, repealing the existing Returns Directive (dir. 2008/115/EC), and replacing it with the new Regulation proposed by the European Commission in early 2025 (COM/2025/101 final).
According to the Return Directive (2008/115/EC) still in force, which will remain in force until the final approval of the new Return Regulation, returns can only take place from the territory of the Member States, in fact it is unequivocally foreseen as “execution of the obligation to return”,… “physical transport out of the Member State” (art. 3 para. 5). Furthermore, “in order to facilitate the return procedure, the need for Community and bilateral readmission agreements with third countries is underlined. International cooperation with countries of origin at all stages of the return procedure is a precondition for sustainable return” (Recital 7). The new Regulations approved by the European Parliament do not yet legitimise new forms of administrative detention, nor automatic mechanisms in forced transfers from the territory of a member country to “safe” third countries.
The Court of Justice of the EU puts the breaks on the externalisation (in Albania) of asylum procedures by imposing a judicial control on the “safe state of origin” designation. See: The C-758/24 and C-759/24 judgment , 1 August 2025. The CJEU reviews legal limits of Italy’s Albania migration scheme.
On Monday 23 March 2026, the EU Court of Justice heard cases C-706/25 Comeri and C-707/25 Sidilli. These cases concern the Italy-Albania Protocol of 6 November 2023, which allows Italy to use repatriation detention centres on Albanian territory under Italian jurisdiction, in order to manage migration flows. Some third-country nationals, who were subject to expulsion orders and were already being detained in Italy, were transferred to one of these centres in Albania. Once there, they applied for international protection but received a new detention order. Two Italian courts have asked the Court of Justice to clarify whether the Italy-Albania Protocol is compatible with EU law. In Comeri and Sidilli, the issues raised concern, in particular, Italy’s competence to conclude the Protocol, the consequences of any failure to validate detention, and respect for the rights of defence and to health. On Tuesday 24 March 2026, the Court of Justice heard case C-414/25 Sedrata. In Sedrata, the focus is on detention and the status of asylum seekers.
The wider significance is political as much as legal. Italy’s Albania model has become one of Europe’s boldest attempts to externalise migration management, and it is situated in a broader EU debate that has steadily moved towards tougher external border controls and deeper cooperation with third countries. The European Parliament’s own research service notes that, while such ideas have repeatedly been proposed, EU law does not actually provide for the processing of asylum applications outside the Union, and externalisation continues to raise serious legal and human-rights concerns.
Migration procedures offshore does not, by itself, move them outside the reach of EU legal guarantees. That principle sits at the core of the Common European Asylum System, especially the rules on asylum procedures and reception conditions.
15. IOM Spokesperson: Hundreds Feared Missing or Dead Amid Reports of Shipwrecks in Central Mediterranean. No substantial progress has been made in the direction of better regulation of rescues at sea by vessels of non-governmental organisations, a matter on which a “Recommendation” from the Commission to the Council had been presented, “on cooperation between Member States regarding operations conducted by vessels owned or operated by private entities for the purposes of search and rescue activities”, when the new pact on migration and asylum was presented on 23 September 2020.
The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights regularly collects data on the operations of NGO vessels involved in search and rescue in the Mediterranean. This includes any legal proceedings against them, as well as any difficulties in disembarking migrants in safe ports. This paper provides an overview of criminal investigations and other legal proceedings initiated by European Union (EU) Member States against civil society organisations deploying search and rescue vessels and aircraft in the Mediterranean and/or against individual crew members. The latest update covers the period from 2018 up until 1 June 2025. Authorities withholding information as hundreds of migrants vanish in the Mediterranean.
Under art. 98 of the Unclos Convention (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) of 1982, titled «Obligation to provide assistance», each State must require that the master of a vessel which he flies his flag, to the extent possible he can fulfill without jeopardizing the ship, the crew or passengers: 1. provide assistance to everyone that is found at sea in dangerous conditions; 2.proceed as quickly as possible to the soccourse of people in danger, if he comes to know of their need for help, to the extent that one can reasonably wait for him to take such an initiative.
Under the same Convention, each coastal State promotes the establishment and functioning of the permanent of an adequate and effective research service and rescue to protect maritime and air safety and, when circumstances require, collaborate ending with adjacent states through agreements. This obligation to collaborate for the purposes of rescue-search at sea is further specified in other Treaties international maritime law, the most important of which are the International Convention for the safety of life at sea (Solas) 16 and the Convention of Hamburg on Search and Rescue at Sea (SAR) of 1979.
The Hamburg SAR Convention of 1979 is based on from on the principle of international cooperation. The search and rescue (SAR) zones are divided entirely-knows with the other States concerned. These areas do not run they necessarily spond at maritime borders
existing. There is an obligation to prepare operatives plan that provide for the various types of emergency and the competences of the Rescue centres responsible (RCC).
The responsibility to provide a place of safety, or to ensure that a place of safety is provided, falls on the Government responsible for the Sar region in which the survivors were recovered” (Guide Line princ. 2.5 ), Ris. IOM 167(78). The first RCC contacted should immediately begin efforts to transfer the case to the RCC responsible for the region in which the assistance is being rendered. When the RCC responsible for the SAR region in which assistance is needed is informed about the situation, that RCC should immediately accept responsibility for co-ordinating the rescue efforts, since related responsibilities, including arrangements for a place of safety for survivors, fall primarily on the Government responsible for that region. The first RCC, however, is responsible for co-ordinating the case until the responsible RCC or other competent authority assumes responsibility (Princip. 6.7). Governments and the responsible RCC should make every effort to minimize the time survivors remain aboard the assisting ship (Princip. 6.8)
Parties having accepted responsibility to provide search and rescue services for a specified area shall use search and rescue units and other available facilities for providing assistance to a person who is, or appears to be, in distress at sea (Art 2.1.9 Annex SAR) On receiving information that any person is, or appears to be, in distress at sea, the responsible authorities of a Party shall take urgent steps to ensure that the necessary assistance is provided. Parties shall ensure that assistance be provided to any person in distress at sea. They shall do so regardless of the nationality or status of such a person or the circumstances in which that person is found (Art 2.1.10 Annex SAR)
16. The externalization of border management and the increasing criminalization of search-and-rescue interventions by maritime NGOs has significant negative humanitarian consequences for migrants both at sea and upon return to third-country points of departure, particularly Libya, where lack of oversight and indiscriminate detention practices threaten their basic human rights. Human-rights experts affiliated with the United Nations have expressed concern that restrictions on NGOs’ search-and-rescue operations “put the lives of thousands of migrants attempting to cross the sea at risk,” and that criminal charges “could have a chilling effect on migrant-rights defenders and on civil society as a whole.” Under art. 33 of the Geneva Refugee Convention, the “No Contracting State shall expel or reject, in any way, a refugee towards the borders of territes in which his life or freedom would be minacelles because of his race, his religion, of his citizenship, of his membership in a social group or its political opinions”. Such obligation was reiterated in the report «Rescue at Sea: A Guide to Principles and Practice as Applied to Migrants and Refugees», developed in 2006 by Imo and from the UNHCR and updated in 2015.
17. For years, Frontex’s surveillance activities and its collaboration with the so-called Libyan coast guard have been subjected to harsh criticism, also within European institutions. Nevertheless, this collaboration continues and the agency is constantly being reinforced. These externalisation policies increasingly reveal the degradation of the field of migration management. Beyond the ambitious proposals in the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, the EU is delegating expulsions to countries that do not respect human rights, and drawing up forced removal plans which are regularly contradicted by basic principles of reality.
As an EU agency, Frontex has human rights obligations under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as well as under the 2019 Frontex Regulation and the agency’s own Fundamental Rights Action Plan. International human rights law obliges Frontex to refrain from violating anyone’s human rights directly and not to expose them indirectly to serious violations of those rights, such as torture, elsewhere. The agency should therefore take steps to mitigate the human rights risks of its intelligence-gathering and border management activities. Frontex is also bound to protect the right to life, including by taking positive steps to prevent loss of life where there are foreseeable threats and life-threatening situations.
18. Search and rescue (SAR) operations in international waters should not be coordinated by a country, such as Libya, which cannot guarantee places of safety in which to disembark people. A place of safety (as referred to in the Annex to the 1979 SAR Convention, 1.3.2) is a location where rescue operations are considered to terminate. It is also a place where the survivors’ safety of life is no longer threatened and where their basic human needs (such as food, shelter and medical needs) can be met. Further, it is a place from which transportation arrangements can be made for the survivors’ next or final destination. Countries that can guarantee places of safety are still obliged to conduct search and rescue operations, even outside their SAR zones.
SAR zones are assigned to Libya (and Malta) for political and economic reasons. Bilateral agreements between these two countries and with Italy, under Frontex’s watchful eye, lead to people being abandoned in international waters in situations of distress. This is not acceptable. These people are effectively removed from any jurisdiction, and then abandoned to militias beyond the control of any state authority. They are people whose fundamental rights, starting with the right to life, cannot find protection before any court.
19. There is therefore no European coverage for the provision contained in the Piantedosi decree (law no. 15/2023) which requires those operating rescue operations in international waters to comply with the instructions coming “from the competent authorities” based on the division of the Mediterranean into areas of SAR (search and rescue) responsibility. In the evaluation criteria dictated by European Regulation No. 656/2014, it is clear that rescue events cannot be downgraded to mere illegal immigration (law enforcement) events to be monitored, when vessels are overloaded, without safety equipment and at a considerable distance from a safe port. Cases in which the authorities of coastal States, such as the masters of civilian vessels, are required to carry out an immediate relief intervention which can only be considered concluded with landing in a place of safety (POS), which Libya and Tunisia today cannot guarantee.
20. To support Member States in the implementation of the Pact, the Commission presented on 12 June 2024 a Common Implementation Plan, mapping out milestones to successfully start applying the new legislation by mid-2026. It will be used as a basis for the preparation of Member States’ National Implementation Plans which are due by December 2024. The implementation of the Pact on Migration and Asylum is a complex process that involves multiple actors, including the European Commission, EU Member States, and EU agencies.
The Common Implementation Plan is a key document that outlines the steps necessary to implement the Pact, and it is based on 10 building blocks that cover different aspects of migration and asylum policy:
- A common migration and asylum information system (Eurodac)
- A new system to manage migration at the EU external borders
- Rethinking reception
- Fair, efficient, and convergent asylum procedures
- Efficient and fair return procedures
- A fair and efficient system: making the new responsibility rules work
- Making solidarity work
- Preparedness, Contingency Planning and Crisis response
- New safeguards for applicants for international protection and vulnerable persons, and increased monitoring of fundamental rights
- Resettlement, Inclusion and Integration
In Italy, unlike other Member States, the national implementation plan has never been made public, placing the reform in limbo, obscuring its scope and hindering informed mobilisation processes (FERRI). With its ruling of March 3, 2026, the Lazio Regional Administrative Court annulled the Ministry of the Interior’s refusal to publish the National Implementation Plan (NAP) relating to the European Pact on Asylum and Migration. The TAR then ordered the Ministry of the Interior to allow access to the requested documents within 30 days.
21. In June 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled in S.S. and Others v. Italy that it lacked jurisdiction over a 2017 Mediterranean rescue case involving Italian coordination of a Libyan interception, citing the area was within Libya’s search and rescue zone. This decision seems to arise in part due to the Court’s framing of the case, and migration issues more generally, in all or nothing terms. In S.S. and others v. Italy, “all” is conceived of as the non-controversially impossible idea that by picking up the phone in the MRCC in Rome the entirety of the Central Mediterranean and all the individuals who traverse it would instantly fall under Italian jurisdiction. And, notwithstanding the “moral disclaimer” related to the abhorrent treatment facing migrants in Libya that is included in the final paragraphs of the decision, “nothing” is thus the Court’s approach. It dismissed the entire case for lack of jurisdiction (I.Drury).
22. The guarantees of fundamental rights typical of the rule of law, to be applied in cases of expulsion and detention, are no longer established by law, but are left in their concrete implementation to agreements of a political nature with third countries, which are not even subject to the jurisdiction of the European Union, while the “independent monitoring” provided for in the Return Regulation proposed last year seems to disappear in the’ latest compromise version approved on 9 March by the LIBE Commission, which refers to already existing surveillance bodies. Jurisdiction remains a bulwark to be defended, to ensure the application of international laws and Conventions without prevarication by government and police authorities. And therefore the principle of independence must be guaranteed, under attack, as in Hungary, when it is not aligned with government guidelines and the principle of separation of powers (rule of law).
23. As demonstrated by the embarrassed silences, thinly veiled contradictions, and highly undetectable distortions in public communication following the approval of the European Pact “against” Migration and Asylum, the media are also under attack from those who would like to impose a single approach that opposes the mobility of migrants and their inclusion in Western societies. Yet they still remain, we do not know for how long, a barrier to stem the spread of a toxic common sense that now even legitimizes administrative practices declared illegal in international courts and tribunals. There is an urgent need for transparency with regard to the control of Italian migration policy and the activities carried out in Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt.
24. With the nationalist drift of the European Union, which could mark its end, at a time when a new unity is being sought on the military front, on the management of energy resources, and on financial measures, no problem related to the “management” of immigration and asylum dossiers will be solved. It will only be possible to increase the level of internal conflict, in the presence of a greater number of people to be deported, detained, punished with prison, or sentenced to live in a state of irregularity and exploitation. Whereas in relations with third countries, starting with Turkey, any further expenditure to finance outsourcing processes will not be able to halt attempts at irregular entry into Europe. Which will still constitute in the future the only posibility of survival for those who are forced to leave territories of origin or transit, such Libya, which now, due to wars of aggression, environmental devastation, or dictatorial regimes allied with big tech economic groups, no longer guarantee any possibility of survival.
