The latest ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) can be regarded as a pro-migration position, Gy\u00f6rgy Bakondi, Chief Security Advisor to the Prime Minister, stated on Thursday. According to Bakondi, the court\u2019s formulation\u2014that illegal migrants cannot be returned to any country where the rights of any minority might be endangered\u2014could be applied to nearly all non-European countries of origin, thereby making deportations practically impossible.<\/p>\n
The CJEU issued the ruling last week in a case brought by two Bangladeshi nationals who were rescued at sea and taken to an Italian detention centre in Albania. They challenged the rejection of their asylum application, arguing that Bangladesh is not safe, despite its designation on Italy\u2019s list of safe countries.<\/p>\n
The ruling significantly undermines Italy\u2019s already embattled Albania model<\/a>, established through an agreement between Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, in 2023. Under the deal, the Balkan country would detain and process the asylum claims of up to 30,000 migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean, with two facilities to be constructed in Albania. The arrangement has already encountered legal challenges in Italian courts, which refused to validate the detention of the first three groups of asylum seekers transferred to Albania in October and November 2024, and again in February. The courts cited a previous CJEU ruling from October, which stipulated that the criteria for designating a third country as a safe country of origin must be fulfilled throughout its entire territory. In those instances, Bangladesh and Egypt were found not to be entirely safe across all regions or for all population groups.<\/p>\n In an effort to circumvent this legal constraint, the Italian government issued a decree in December listing 19 countries, including Bangladesh and Egypt, as \u2018safe\u2019 for repatriation. However, Italian judges\u2014long at odds with Meloni\u2014referred the matter to the CJEU, seeking clarification on how a country\u2019s safety should be assessed and whether EU law overrides national legislation in cases of conflict.<\/p>\n Meloni described the court\u2019s decision as \u2018surprising\u2019 and accused the EU judiciary of overreach. \u2018Once again, the judiciary\u2014this time at the European level\u2014claims spaces that do not belong to it, encroaching on responsibilities that are political,\u2019 she stated last Friday.<\/p>\n Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n is likewise highly critical of the CJEU\u2019s approach to migration-related cases. Speaking at the European Political Community (EPC) summit in Budapest in November 2024, Orb\u00e1n warned that a major obstacle to the political will for change is what he termed \u2018judicial activism\u2019<\/a>. He argued that \u2018we decide things\u2019, governments implement them, but common decisions are frequently undermined by European\u2014and subsequently national\u2014judicial rulings, causing progress in reducing migration to unravel. The only exception, he emphasized, is Hungary, which has consistently resisted judicial activism. The Prime Minister asserted: \u2018I don\u2019t think we can stop migration if we don\u2019t revolt against the laws and court rulings currently in force.\u2019<\/p>\n