Meloni battles judges in Italy over her anti-migrant plan

Emma Bubola

Rome: Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had scored a coup. She pushed through a tough anti-migration plan that would force some asylum seekers headed for Italy instead into a detention center in Albania while their claims are heard. At a time when anti-immigration sentiments are rising in Europe, the program caught the eyes of other European leaders who viewed it as a potential blueprint.

Then, within days of the first migrants arriving in a newly built detention center in a former Albanian military base, an Italian court upended Ms. Meloni’s plans.

The judges this month demanded that the migrants be sent to Italy, saying their detention would violate a European court ruling. The decision set off a public row between the judiciary and the government that is falling along familiar battle lines, in which conservative officials accuse judges of having an activist, and often liberal, bent.

Ms. Meloni, a conservative, denounced the ruling, and her supporters pointed to a leaked email from a judge that they said showed a political bias. The email to the judge’s colleagues suggested Ms. Meloni was more of a “danger” than the conservative former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose feuds with the judiciary engulfed Italy’s political life for decades.

Ms. Meloni later posted excerpts from the email on social media. Then, on Friday, Italy’s popular weekly magazine L’Espresso splashed a drawing of Ms. Meloni and a red-robed judge fencing on its cover.

“It’s a longstanding and unresolved conflict” between the government and the judiciary, said Serena Sileoni, a professor of constitutional law at Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples.

For Ms. Meloni, who has made curbing immigration a signature policy, the ruling was a blow, even though it is unclear if the roadblock is temporary or something more difficult to overcome.

The standoff has echoes of battles that have played out recently in other countries, including in Mexico and Israel, as leaders found themselves stymied by their courts.

The tensions in Italy began over a week ago, after 12 migrants picked up by Italian ships in the Mediterranean became the first to be held in Albania. Under Ms. Meloni’s plan, only men coming from what Italy considers “safe countries” could be held in the Balkan country. The men in the first group were from Egypt and Bangladesh, both categorized as safe by Italy.

But the judges in Rome ruled that because of a recent decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the men should not be held in Albania. That European asylum ruling found that no nation of origin could be considered safe if even only a part was dangerous. Based on that ruling, the Italian judges said the 12 men’s home countries could not be considered safe.

Ms. Meloni’s government is trying to get around the Italian court decision by drafting a new list of safe countries and eliminating a few nations to meet the European standards, but it did not remove Egypt and Bangladesh. The government also appealed the Roman court’s ruling, even as the Italian Navy took the 12 migrants in the middle of the dispute to Italy.

“It’s very hard to work and try to give answers to this nation when you face the opposition of a part of the institutions that are supposed to help you,” Ms. Meloni said soon after the court order, suggesting the courts were blocking her attempts to address many Italians’ concerns on immigration.

On Thursday, a group of liberal magistrates said the public debate had become so tense that its president, who was a judge on the Albania ruling, had received death threats. The group blamed the threats on the “climate of contrast, of hatred” created against the Roman judges.

Because Italy’s Constitution was written after Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, the judiciary has long enjoyed great independence from the government.

But in the 1990s, a sweeping inquiry of a large bribery scandal empowered and emboldened the judiciary as thousands of politicians and business leaders were put under investigation, and many were convicted. The so-called Bribesville scandal left many Italians angry and disillusioned with their ruling class, and in their eyes, the courts became a critical and trusted check on corrupt officials.

Over time, however, critics — mostly conservatives, but also some liberals — began to accuse the judges of overreaching to pursue political agendas.

When Mr. Berlusconi came to power after the bribery scandal, he took the rivalry between the judiciary and the government to incendiary levels, setting himself up against what he called the “toghe rosse,” or “red robes,” Communist magistrates who he said persecuted him.

Many of his supporters shared his outrage for what they saw as judicial activism, while his opponents saw the judiciary as a bulwark against Mr. Berlusconi, who was implicated in dozens of trials, many for corruption.

During Mr. Berlusconi’s trials, as well as many others, a tight relationship between the judiciary and the news media meant that wiretaps from investigations and court documents became public during proceedings. The practice has long attracted criticism from supporters of the principle of presumption of innocence, who said it created a parallel media trial through which defendants were found guilty in the eyes of the Italian public even before a verdict was announced.

The battle over the courts’ role in Italian society has continued since, and it has recently centered on the issue of immigration.

Now, Ms. Meloni has taken up the fight. Experts say that, like Mr. Berlusconi, Ms. Meloni and her allies see their mandate as the most legitimate expression of the will of the Italian people, and they chafe at having unelected people, including judges, interfere with their policies.

The judiciary “should not use its power to change the laws or prevent the government from doing its job,” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said after the migrant ruling.

But the association of liberal magistrates, called Democratic Judiciary — which includes the judge who wrote the email — has countered that “no political majority, not even the widest, can compress inalienable human rights.”

Under the Albania plan, if the asylum seekers were sent there and their claims were accepted, they would be transferred to Italy. If the claims were rejected, the migrants would be repatriated. (That is different from the Rwanda plan that Britain’s former government tried to carry out. Under that program, even people who were granted asylum would have been resettled in Rwanda, rather than in Britain.)

The Italian judges’ decision did not apply to the Albania program as a whole, but only to the first group of migrants who were taken there. However, judicial experts said the judges could make similar arguments for other migrants, casting the viability of Ms. Meloni’s program, an important piece of her agenda, in doubt.

On the other hand, if after wrangling with the courts Ms. Meloni’s plan gets the go-ahead, she could be seen as a leader in Europe on migration policy at a time when the European Union’s stance is already tilting right.

In any case, what is clear is that the two sides in Italy have no intention of giving up.

“There is so much at stake on the topic of immigration,” said Ms. Sileoni, the constitutional law professor. “That is why they are rekindling the fire of this historic conflict.”