
The Supreme Court of the European Union has supported Italian judges who questioned a list of "safe countries" drawn up by Rome, while it has started deporting migrants to detention centers in Albania.
The government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni denounced the European Court of Justice (ECtHR) decision and said it "weakens policies to fight illegal mass immigration".
Meloni's plan to transfer migrant processing to a country outside the EU and speed up the repatriation of rejected asylum seekers has been closely followed by others in the EU.
The costly scheme has been frozen for months by legal challenges.
Italian magistrates have cited the European court's ruling that EU states cannot designate an entire country as "safe" when certain regions are not.
On Friday, in a long-awaited ruling, the Luxembourg-based CJEU said Italy is free to decide which countries are "safe", but warned that such a determination must meet strict legal standards and allow applicants and courts to access and challenge supporting evidence.
In its statement, the European Court of Justice said a Rome court had addressed EU judges, citing the impossibility of accessing such information and thus preventing it from "challenging and examining the legality of such a presumption of security".
The ECtHR also said that a country may not be classified as "safe" if it does not offer sufficient protection for its entire population, agreeing with Italian judges who had raised the case last year.
Meloni and her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, had signed a migration agreement in November 2023, and last year, Rome opened two centres in Albania, where it planned to process up to 36,000 asylum seekers a year.