Six of the original 49, two adults adjudged vulnerable and four minors, were taken back to Italy.

A day after videoconference hearings with the Asylum Commission to examine the process of the applications for international protection, the response arrived Thursday and all 43 were judged to be ‘manifestly unfounded’.

The 43 migrants will now have 7 days to appeal the rejection of their application.

“The Commissions clearly operate in continuity with the manifest will of the executive to reject asylum seekers, in contempt of international, European and constitutional law,” said the Asylum and Immigration Committee.

The committee is on the third day of its mission in Albania with the parliamentarians of the contact group for the monitoring of the Italian-Albanian centres.

The committee denounced that “the people were not able to seek legal assistance nor were they able to prepare for the hearings with adequate legal information”.

“We are faced with a procedure that is in fact illegitimate due to the lack of protections provided by the legislation in force,” it continued.

“[This model] has the sole objective of cancelling the right to asylum and continuing to propose a negative and criminalising image of those who arrive on our shores.”

Meanwhile, rulings on the legality under international law of the migrants’ detention, after two previous batches’ detention was ruled unlawful last year, were postponed until Friday at Italian courts of appeal.

The migrants are from Egypt and Bangladesh, two countries whose territory was not wholly judged safe in the previous two rulings.

Rome has since updated its list of safe countries, adding the two.

The scheme has aroused international interest but condemnation from rights groups.

The scheme has been costed at some 800 million euros over five years and is estimated to be able to process 3000 migrants a month.

ANSA