New law in Italy speeds up asylum decisions and deportations

TMP – 05/05/2017

The Italian parliament has brought in new laws aimed at accelerating the processing of deciding asylum applications.

The new laws will ease the pressure on asylum shelters by speeding up the deportation of migrants whose asylum appeals have been rejected. To do this the new law has reduced the number of asylum appeals from three to two.

In February, Interior Minister Marco Minniti said that the current appeal process had caused a bottleneck in the civil courts with a definitive response to an asylum request taking two years in some cases.

Justice minister Andrea Orlando said that while the new process will be much more streamlined, people’s rights will not be diminished.

In 2016, Italy rejected more than 60 percent of the 124,000 asylum requests it received from migrants.

Italy also plans to build more migrant detention centres to have one in every region of the country.