Italian Navy patrol vessel
Cassiopea early on Tuesday reached the Albanian port of Shengjin
with 49 migrants rescued over the weekend in international
waters south of the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. The ship
reached the port at 7:30 am, ANSA has learned. The majority of
the migrants on board are from Bangladesh. The other passengers
include Egyptian, Ivorian and Gambian citizens. They will be
taken to an Italian-run fast-track processing centre for asylum
seekers who hail from countries deemed as safe under legislation
passed by the government in December - which lists 19 nations as
safe -and who did not hand over identity papers to Italian
authorities. After reaching the port, the migrants will first go
through medical screening procedures at an Italian-run hotspot
at the port. Those deemed vulnerable will be taken to Italy, as
occurred during two previous migrant transfers to Albania, in
October and November last year. Once the migrants will be fed
and provided with new clothes, security officials will begin
identification procedures, which in the past have lasted hours.
Their final destination will the centre of Gjader inland, which
is a few kilometres away from the port, where the asylum seekers
are expected to spend the night and the coming weeks as they
wait for their asylum applications to be processed. Those whose
applications will be rejected will be transferred to a CPR
pre-removal detention centre inside the camp, where a small
prison has also been set up for those who could be accused of
crimes. Under legislation passed in January, the detention of
asylum seekers will now need to be approved by Italian appeals
courts rather than by special immigration sections of courts of
first instance, which will manage different cases concerning
migrants. The transfer on Tuesday is Italy's third as part of
the government's plan to process asylum seekers in Albania, a
non-European Union country. The fast-track processing policy was
blocked last year by immigration judges who failed to validate
the detention of the first two small groups of men from
Bangladesh and Egypt taken to Albania, referring their cases to
the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The ECJ on October 4 last
year had established that a person seeking asylum could not be
repatriated to their country if it was not deemed wholly safe.
The government has since drafted a list of safe countries
including Egypt and Bangladesh and transferred jurisdiction in
the cases to appeals courts. The European court is set to review
Italy's plan to determine whether it complies with EU law.
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