Italian politics has been split into supporters and critics of the world’s richest man and top Trump supporter’s intervention.
The entire fiasco comes in the context of the Italian government’s controversial agreement with Albania to run migrant-centres on Albanian territory.
As a result of the Rome judges’ decision, the seven migrants, who are citizens of Egypt and Bangladesh, were brought to the Italian port of Brindisi early on Tuesday.
On October 18, the same court ruled against the detention of 12 migrants who were part of the first group to be taken to Albania.
On October 21, the Italian government approved a new decree listing 19 countries, including Egypt and Bangladesh, as safe.
They said courts cannot rule against it on the basis of the October 4 European Court of Justice on which the Rome court’s initial decision was based.
The Rome court on Monday refuted that in a note issued after its decision on the new case, saying that the “criteria for the designation of a State as a safe country of origin are laid out by European Union law”.
It added that judges have the “duty to always and concretely verify” the “correct implementation of the Union’s law, which, notoriously, prevails over national law when it is incompatible with it, as also provided for by the Italian Constitution”.
The note clarified that the designation of a country as safe “is relevant only to identify the procedures to be implemented” in a specific case.
According to the note, it does “not prevent the repatriation and/or the expulsion of the migrant person whose asylum request has been rejected or that does not have the legal requirements to stay in Italy”.
“These judges need to go,” said Tesla, X and SpaceX owner Musk via X on a user’s post on the news of the suspension by the immigration section of the Court of Rome.
The court also referred the case to the European Court of Justice, which has ruled that neither Egypt nor Bangladesh are wholly safe and therefore emigrants from these countries must be processed as asylum seekers.
Musk was a big supporter of Donald Trump’s successful US Presidential election campaign, and he looks set to hold a powerful position in the new administration.
It is the second time the outspoken multi-billionaire has spoken out on Italian migration.
Last year, Musk slammed Germany’s policy of helping charities that rescue migrants and take them to Italy’s shores.
Among those who welcomed Musk’s apparent call for the judges to be removed from their posts was right-wing League party leader, Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini.
On Monday, Salvini described the ruling as “another political sentence against Italians”.
He had characterised the previous similar ruling as the work of allegedly politically motivated “Communist” judges acting against the interests of Italians and the safety of their borders.
Salvini is currently the subject of a Palermo trial in which he is accused of kidnapping 147 migrants by refusing to let them off a Spanish NGO run rescue ship in Lampedusa for 19 days five years ago.
This was done as part of his controversial ‘closed ports policy’ while he was Italy’s hardline interior minister.
“Elon Musk is right,” said Salvini.
“On December 20, I could receive a 6-year prison sentence for having blocked, as Minister of the Interior, the landings of illegal immigrants.
“Seen from abroad, all this seems even more incredible.”
But a minor ally of Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party and the League, Maurizio Lupi of the We Moderates group, was critical of Musk’s intervention.
“Elon Musk’s words are inappropriate because, even from abroad, they fuel a clash with the judiciary that the Centre-Right does not want,” he said.
Meanwhile, FdI bigwig Fabio Rampelli criticised both sides.
“Judges who oppose our repatriation policy are wrong,” he said.
“Both because they exceed their duties, both because they politically interpret the ruling of the European Court of Justice which says something completely different, both because the States should speak to supranational institutions and not the courts.
“However, we are equipped to defend ourselves.
“We thank Elon Musk, but we are not like the left, which drools to amplify Italian critical issues at an international level, ridiculing the nation.
“We will know how to make our reasons prevail and this further attempt to favour immigration by the left and certain magistrates will make us rise even further in the consensus of Italians.”
The centre left was predictably highly critical of the tech tycoon’s intervention.
MPs Angelo Bonelli of the Green-Left Alliance and Andrea Casu of the centre-left Democratic Party, the biggest opposition group, asked Meloni to intervene.
“An unacceptable interference and a serious problem for democracy,” said Bonelli.
“The Prime Minister is called to defend the Constitution and democracy attacked by Musk … [who] is in fact Trump’s right-hand man.”
“Musk’s attack on Italian judges is an intolerable interference,” said Casu.
“It is essential that the Prime Minister intervene and demonstrate whether she is defending national sovereignty or whether she is silently accepting this attack.”
Italian Left leader Nicola Fratoianni said, “I don’t know if the government will worry about defending sovereignty and borders from Musk’s interference this time.”
Meloni said, after Trump’s stunning comeback victory in which the tycoon gave out a million dollars a day to prospective supporters, that Musk is “an added value and potential interlocutor”.
On September 23, Musk presented Meloni with the Global Citizen Award 2024.
The award was from Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council, praising her as “someone who is even more beautiful inside than outside”.
Musk said Meloni had done “an incredible job” as prime minister with “record growth and employment”.
“She is someone who is authentic, honest, truthful,” added the billionaire during a ceremony at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Manhattan.
Thanking Musk for his “precious genius”, Meloni delivered a passionate defence of Western values.
Pictures of the pair enjoying each other’s company forced Musk to deny suggestions they might be having an affair.
ANSA
