Billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday waded into a fraught debate over the hard-right Italian government’s migrant policy, prompting outrage from lawyers and the opposition just days after Musk called Germany’s chancellor a “fool”.
Judges on Monday rejected the detention of a second group of migrants transferred to Italian-run centres in Albania, referring the case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
An initial transfer of migrants to the centres last month was similarly blocked by judges, who cited a recent ECJ ruling questioning the way Italy designates countries as “safe” for migrant repatriations.
“These judges need to go,” commented Musk — the world’s richest man who played a major role in the re-election of Donald Trump as US president — on the X social network that he owns.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right, anti-immigration League party, responded in English: “Elon Musk is right.”
But the centre-left Democratic Party branded the comment as an “unacceptable interference” in Italian affairs.
Lawyer Ernesto Carbone, who sits on the High Council of the Judiciary, condemned Musk as one of the “new oligarchs” aspiring to “control world politics and who are a danger to democracy”.
Italy’s National Magistrates’ Association likewise expressed its “stupefaction” at the tech titan’s intervention.
“It is no longer the independence of the judiciary that is in question here, but the sovereignty of the Italian state,” said the association’s vice-president Alessandra Maddalena.
EU eyes on Italy
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni took office in 2022 vowing to reduce the tens of thousands of migrants who arrive on Italy’s shores each year, but her policies have faced repeated challenges in the courts.
These include the stuttering, year-old plan to process applications in Albania of asylum seekers picked up by Italian authorities in the Mediterranean, and judged to be from so-called “safe” countries.
If implemented, the plan would mark the first time a European Union nation processes migrants outside the bloc. The Italian effort is being closely watched across the continent.
However, it has so far fallen foul of the judiciary.
A first group of 16 Bangladeshi and Egyptian men transferred to Albania last month were sent on to Italy following rulings by judges. Four were ruled “vulnerable” and so ineligible for the Albania centres, and a court refused to endorse the detention of the other 12, citing the ECJ ruling on the designation of “safe” countries.
To be eligible for the two Italian-run centres in Albania, migrants must hail from so-called “safe countries”.
The judges cited an ECJ ruling stipulating that EU states can only designate entire countries as safe, not parts of countries — and Italy’s list included some countries with unsafe areas.
In response, Meloni’s government passed a law limiting its safe list to 19 countries — from 22 — and insisting all parts of those nations were safe.
But in a ruling Monday on the second group of transferred migrants — seven men from Egypt and Bangladesh — judges in Rome said they wanted clarification from the ECJ.
Musk last week labelled Olaf Scholz a “fool” on X after the dramatic collapse of the German chancellor’s coalition government.
