Italy has become the first European Union country to bite the bullet and set up a scheme to off-shore migrant asylum seekers to a country outside the bloc. Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni says she hopes the scheme, signed off in Rome last week with Albania’s left-wing prime minister, Edi Rama, will become a model copied across the EU.
It is similar to the Tory government’s troubled Rwanda scheme, but more practical and less vulnerable to legal challenge. Italy will process asylum requests in Albania where it plans to send tens of thousands of migrants a year. Britain, meanwhile, plans to hand the task of deciding who gets asylum to Rwanda and to send only a few hundred a year.
Later today, the UK Supreme Court is due to deliver judgement on the Rwanda scheme, which was blocked in 2022 by the European Court of Human Rights but whose deterrent factor is vital to Rishi’s Sunak’s famous pledge to stop the boats.
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