October 15, 2024
The first migrants who set sail from the African coast of Tripolitania, and initially headed for Italy, are going to the two centers opened by the Italian government in Albania. They are on board the Navy ship Libra. Docking in the port of Shengjin is scheduled for tomorrow morning at the latest. These refugees, sixteen in total, coming from Egypt and Bangladesh, were rescued the day before yesterday in international waters in the SAR (Search and Rescue) area under the jurisdiction of our country. The opposition, which in recent months has always criticized the construction of these two repatriation centres, where migrants will be held for the time necessary to examine their asylum requests, is crying scandal.
Yet, the law remains the Italian one. If their requests are accepted, they will be transferred to the Peninsula. Otherwise, they will be accompanied to their respective countries of origin. The left defines it as a “gigantic waste”, amounting to around 800 million euros. Giorgia Meloni’s reply comes from social media. The prime minister, in fact, responded to a tweet from the German NGO Sea Watch which had accused “the government of spending hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ euros to deport and incarcerate a few thousand migrants in Albania”, because “perhaps the Italians’ taxes can be spent better, to welcome and include, rather than reject”.
The Prime Minister’s response was sharp: «What a scandal! A government that, with a clear mandate received from citizens, works to defend the Italian borders and stop human trafficking, through concrete actions and international agreements.” The anger of the German NGO is easily understandable. Bringing migrants to Albania (currently the capacity is 400 places) is an eyesore for all these organizations that patrol the Mediterranean in search of migrants to take to Italy. The centers of Shengjin (on the coast) and Gjader (inland), in fact, have above all a deterrent function to discourage the departures of boats, as the Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has explained several times.
Yet, the left is furious. The secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein tries to attribute policies on migrants to those on healthcare, as if fighting illegal immigration is incompatible with investments in hospitals and local medicine. «The Meloni government throws eight hundred million of Italian money into an agreement for the deportation of migrants to Albania and does so in defiance of the ruling of the European Court of Justice, moreover without transparency, with direct assignments. Money that we could have spent on healthcare: there are Italians who wait months for a gastroscopy. We don’t fit in.” The declarations of Nicola Fratoianni (Avs) are of the same tenor: «They are infernal places of detention», and Matteo Orfini (Pd): «It is a dark page for our country».
Meanwhile, just yesterday, judge Lorenza Calcagno of the civil court of Genoa, who rejected the administrative detention of the NGO Geo Barents in the Ligurian port, motivated her decision as follows: «It prevents the realization of the purpose of the ship, intended for rescue at sea without navigation restrictions”. The ship, with 205 migrants on board, had been detained for “technical deficiencies” and for failing to comply with the instructions of the Libyan coast guard during a rescue operation.
#Meloni #challenges #NGOs #Schlein #protests #Tempo
