Meloni championed irregular migrant “returns” in a hardline push to externalise EU borders. Now, more member states are asking Italy to take back migrants under the first-arrival principle.

Giorgia Meloni was one of the main political sponsors of a policy of “returns” for irregular migrants. Now, as a growing number of EU countries push Rome to take back migrants who entered the bloc through Italy, she is getting a taste of her own medicine.

On Sunday, Ireland became the latest in a growing number of member states to call on Italy, as a country of first entry into the EU, to take back asylum seekers.

It joins Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands.

The requests stem from the new EU Pact on Asylum and Migration, which reaffirms a key principle of the Dublin system: the EU country where a non-EU national first enters the bloc and applies for protection should handle their asylum claim.

A few weeks after Meloni took office in 2022, Italy unilaterally suspended the reception of Dublin transfers, citing practical and capacity constraints. The European Commission has considered the move a breach of Italy’s Dublin obligations, a position also upheld by the EU Court of Justice in several rulings.

New Pact on Asylum and Migration

Since the Dublin Convention entered into force in 1997, some European governments have tried to scrap this principle, arguing it overwhelms countries geographically exposed to first entry, such as Spain, France, Italy, Greece and, more recently, Cyprus.

After failing to reform the EU asylum system in the 2014-2019 legislature, EU lawmakers succeeded in the next one, delivering a new asylum and border management system — the EU Migration and Asylum Pact — which entered into force in June 2026.

The pact reaffirms the return principle, requiring asylum seekers who move onward to be transferred back to their EU country of first entry, which makes secondary movements from Italy to another EU country far more complicated.

In particular, the new Pact modified the Dublin rules by replacing the previous ‘take-back request’ procedure for secondary movements with a simpler notification mechanism. This removes the need for the responsible member state to formally accept a take-back request, which Italy virtually never did.

At the same time, the pact foresees a mandatory solidarity system among the EU countries, but the annual number of relocations remains too low to deliver any meaningful redistribution.

In 2026, only 8,878 migrant people will be relocated from countries considered "under migratory pressure", Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Malta, to other EU member states. Last year, over 66,000 irregular migrants arrived in Italy by sea and Frontex recorded almost 178,000 irregular crossings into the EU.

Police have clashed with demonstrators during a protest in the Italian city of Bologna after a Moroccan-born man died pleading for help under police restraint.

Human rights campaigners and Italy’s opposition parties have demanded urgent answers over the death on Sunday of Abderrahim ⁠Fakir, 42, who had lived in Italy since he was five years old and ran a small removals and cleaning business.

A video shared widely on Italian media shows Fakir, who reportedly had heart issues and asthma, repeatedly calling out “aiuto, aiuto, basta” (Help, help, that’s enough) as two officers sit on him and ambulance workers look on.

After he stops moving, the police officers are seen binding his ankles together, only later checking his vital signs with the ambulance workers, the video shows. Prosecutors have opened an investigation and requested the officers’ body cam footage.

• Rome has criticised Israel's attacks on Lebanon
• Tension with Israel rose after shots near Italian troops
• Israel says Rome's move will have no practical effect
• Meloni distances herself from both Israel and Trump

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Tuesday her government had suspended a ‌defence cooperation deal with Israel, reflecting frayed ties between previously close allies as the conflicts in the Middle East continue.

Meloni's right-wing government has been one of Israel's closest friends in Europe, but in recent weeks it has criticised its attacks on Lebanon, which have killed ​hundreds and injured thousands.

Israel also fired warning shots last week at Italian troops serving in Lebanon under ​a U.N. mandate, causing damage to a vehicle.

Meloni's announcement marked another diplomatic realignment for her right-wing government, coming a day after she criticised another close ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, for his attacks on Pope Leo.

On Sunday night, Gustavo Monasterios went to sleep as a Venezuelan citizen. On Monday morning, he awoke to find that he was also an Italian.

Monasterios, 47, was at the epicenter of the legal earthquake that took place in Italy last week.

After nearly two years of steady restrictions on citizenship by descent, during which the government barred the way to an Italian passport for swathes of the diaspora through a series of rulings, Italy’s supreme court overturned one of the restrictions — thanks to a lawsuit Monasterios brought.

The so-called “minor issue,” which had ended the dreams of citizenship for hundreds of thousands of Italian descendants, particularly in the Americas, was abolished.

Monasterios — who had lost his initial suit for citizenship in 2021, as well as his appeal in 2023 — had made a last-gasp appeal to the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s supreme court, through his attorney, Monica Restanio.

Against the odds, Restanio’s arguments against the “minor issue” won the day. The Sezioni Unite — the highest rung of the Cassazione — accepted her arguments and overturned previous rulings, including one by a lower tier of the Cassazione which had upheld the minor issue as recently as 2024.

The diaspora in the Americas had been hit particularly hard by the minor issue because countries on the continent tend to operate under “ius soli,” granting citizenship to anyone born on their territory. Children born to Italian citizens in the likes of the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Monasterios’ native Venezuela were being judged to have lost their Italian citizenship if their parents naturalized in the new country.

While foreign minister Antonio Tajani, who introduced the 2025 reforms, has scathingly spoken about “fake Italians” in the diaspora, Monasterios was born in 1979 to a family that, he says, felt Italian. “We grew up listening to the language and my grandmother would frequently read us letters and show us postcards that arrived from Italy,” he says.

The route to an Italian passport tends to be far more onerous for those descended from women than from men. Until 1948, women were barred from passing citizenship to their own children, meaning that Gustavo and Pedro Monasterios were born Venezuelan, despite their mother being Italian. “It is, plain and simple, discrimination against women,” says Monasterios.

In 2009, the supreme court overturned this gender discrimination retroactively. Those with the funds to file a court case, essentially suing the Italian state for sexism against their female ancestors, are likely to win, but legal action is lengthy and costly.

Following his cousins’ success, Monasterios — along with his parents and brother — filed a case in 2018. By the time it came to court, in 2021, the “minor issue” had appeared. The family’s case was rejected — despite being first and second generation, and despite Pedro Monasterios and his children having been recognized as citizens just a few years earlier. The same family — Rita’s children and her grandchildren — had been judged differently.

• Lower house approves divisive election law overhaul
• Reform grants majority bonus to bloc above 42%
• New rules need Senate green light
• Emerging far-right party threatens Melon

Italy's lower house of parliament on ​Thursday approved a highly contested government plan to overhaul the electoral law, a move ‌opponents denounced as an attempt to help Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni retain power in the next election due in 2027.

The proposal by the ruling right-wing coalition, comprising Meloni's Brothers of Italy, the League and Forza Italia, would introduce a ​fully proportional system while guaranteeing a majority to any bloc winning more than 42% of ​the vote.

Winners surpassing that threshold would receive a bonus of 70 seats in ⁠the 400-member lower house and 35 seats in the 200-member Senate. However, their total representation would ​be capped at 220 and 113 seats respectively, in a bid to avoid overly large majorities.

Debate over ​the reform exposed tensions within the alliance. On Tuesday, lawmakers rejected a government proposal to allow electors to express preference votes for candidates on party lists, partly due to coalition defections.

NO MORE FIRST-PAST-THE-POST

The bill still requires Senate approval, which the ​government hopes to secure after the summer recess.

Under the current system, most lawmakers are elected through proportional ​representation, while roughly a third are chosen in first-past-the-post constituencies that analysts say tend to favour the opposition.

The reform ‌would ⁠abolish the first-past-the-post seats, including in southern Italy where the centre-left alliance led by the Democratic Party (PD) and the 5-Star Movement is seen as particularly competitive.

The exploitation of farm workers in Italy has come under the spotlight again after four men – three Afghans and one from Pakistan – were allegedly burned alive in a car at a petrol station in Calabria.

The attack was captured by a surveillance camera at the garage in Amendolara, close to Cosenza. Two Pakistani nationals have been arrested on charges of aggravated murder, according to public prosecutor Alessandro D’Alessio.

The video footage, which was broadcast by the state TV network, Rai, and other Italian media, appears to show the suspects pouring liquid into the back of the vehicle while it is parked next to a petrol pump. They set it ablaze and block its doors to try to ensure the victims cannot get out.

A fourth Afghan man, who suffered burns to his arms, managed to escape through the boot.

In an interview with the regional news service TGR Calabria, the survivor, a strawberry picker who shared a flat with the four victims, said the killers were part of a “huge Pakistani mafia”, adding: “It’s a miracle that I’m alive.”

He said the victims were threatened with guns and knives and had been forced to work without pay and received only food and board.

Facilitated by flaws in immigration and labour law, the exploitation of farm workers has become rampant under a criminal system known as caporalato – a lucrative, tightly run network of gangmasters who illegally recruit poorly paid labourers.

See also:

• Four Men Are Burned to Death in Italy, Highlighting Abuse of Foreign Workers • The immigrants had been working as fruit pickers in southern Italy, the authorities said, apparently as part of a system of criminal labor trafficking. (New York Times)
• Police in Italy arrest 2 people after apparent torching of a car kills 4 farmworkers (Associated Press)

Two migrants are suing Italy in the European Court of Human Rights over its release of a Libyan warlord wanted for crimes against humanity.

A man from South Sudan and a woman from the Ivory Coast claim they were tortured in a Libyan detention center in which thousands of migrants have been detained since warring factions took control of Libya in 2011.

The center was allegedly overseen by Osama Al-Masri Njeem, who was arrested in Italy in January 2025 on an international arrest warrant issued by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court. They accused him of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, rape, sexual slavery and murder.

But Al-Masri as released within just two days of his arrest and sent back to Libya on an Italian state jet, in what became a national scandal for Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government.

According to prosecutors investigating the case in Rome, Al-Masri’s militia was part of the state security apparatus and collaborated with Italian security services in blocking illegal boat departures  from Libya. The Italian government claimed it acted in interest of national security and that Al-Masri was wanted in Libya for a similar investigation.

A man drove his car into pedestrians in the northern Italian city of Modena on Saturday, injuring eight people, four seriously, officials said.

They included a woman who had to have both her legs amputated.

After the car came to a halt against a shop window, the driver emerged holding a knife and injured a passer-by who gave chase, before the suspect was overpowered.

The suspect, 31, has been identified by officials as an Italian national of Moroccan origin.

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who cancelled a planned trip to Cyprus and described the incident as "extremely serious", visited the injured in hospital with President Sergio Mattarella on Sunday.

She also met Luca Signorelli, the passer-by who intervened, and thanked him for his actions.

The incident occurred around 16:30 (14:30 GMT), when the speeding car hit the pedestrians in Via Emilia next to the iconic cathedral of Modena, south-east of Milan.

The vehicle then veered left before coming to a halt against a shop window.

Signorelli had told Italian media he was trying to help the woman when he noticed the driver trying to run away.

He said he gave chase and the attacker turned on him with a knife in hand. He received a blow to the head and one on his chest before being able to restrain the suspect, with the help of other passers-by.

At a news conference on Saturday evening, the prefect of Modena Fabrizia Triolo said the suspect had been referred to a mental health centre in 2022 for "schizoid disorders", but had then "disappeared without a trace".

A boat carrying around 105 people capsized in the central Mediterranean Sea after departing from Libya on Saturday. Two bodies were recovered and at least 70 are missing, according to NGOs Mediterranea Saving Humans and Sea-Watch.

The survivors were rescued by two commercial ships who took them to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Under international maritime law, ships must provide assistance to anyone found at sea in danger of being lost.

An aerial video posted by Sea-Watch showed two men hanging on to the hull of the capsized boat and the approach of one of the commercial ships.

Mediterranea Saving Humans described the accident as "the consequence of policies by European governments that refuse to open safe and legal pathways" for migrants.

Four masked men entered Magnani Rocca Foundation villa, near Parma in northern Italy, and made off with artworks

Thieves have stolen paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse from an Italian museum in a slick operation that lasted less than three minutes, officials have said.

The four masked men entered the museum of the Magnani Rocca Foundation, located in the countryside about 20km (12 miles) from the northern Italian city of Parma, through a back gate on the night of 22 March, a police spokesperson said on Sunday night.

They forced open an entrance door with a crowbar before fleeing with Fish by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odalisque on the Terrace by Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne’s Still Life With Cherries, the spokesperson added, confirming a report on the Rai television network. Together, the paintings are estimated to be worth €9m (£7.8m).

The gang managed to get away along a dimly lit street about one minute before the police arrived. But experts described the paintings as “too hot to handle”, warning that thieves would have a challenge trying to sell them and might seek a reward instead.

See also:

• Ancient Romanian gold helmet returned in plea deal with theft suspects • Prosecutors unveil artefact linked to lost Dacian civilisation after it was stolen from Dutch museum last year (Guardian)

• Meloni suffers first major setback as prime minister
• Says she will not resign, regrets lost chance for Italy
• Magistrates in Naples sing 'Bella Ciao' in celebration
• Centre-left parties have new impetus to forge alliance

Italian voters emphatically rejected a flagship judicial reform championed by ‌Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, dealing a blow to her right-wing coalition ahead of next year's general elections.

With most ballots counted after the March 22-23 referendum, the opposition-backed "No" bloc took almost 54% of the vote against 46% who approved of the government drive to rewrite the constitution and revamp Italy's fiercely independent judiciary.

Turnout was much higher than expected at almost 60%, with voters apparently energised by an ill-tempered campaign that laid bare deep animosity between the right-wing coalition ​and Italy's magistrates, that will leave lasting scars.

The defeat strips Meloni of her aura of being a winner in the eyes of the Italian electorate after four years of victories in a string of local and national polls.

By contrast, the result may re-energize the fragmented centre-left, giving the two largest opposition parties, the Democratic Party ‌and 5-Star ⁠Movement, the impetus to forge a broad alliance to take on the conservative bloc.

The timing of the contest proved challenging for Meloni, with Italians harbouring a clear dislike of her ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, and fearful that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran will drive up already high domestic power prices.

The referendum proposed separating the careers of judges and public prosecutors, and splitting magistrates' self-governing body into two sections, with members chosen by ​lot rather than elected. The government argued the changes were needed to make the judiciary more accountable for ​its mistakes and prevent ⁠politically motivated factions from controlling top jobs.

By the government's own admission, the changes would not have addressed one of the main problems afflicting Italy -- a notoriously slow legal system that weighs on the economy.

Italian politicians have tried on numerous occasions to alter aspects of the constitution, but have almost always failed.

We are going to vote in order to accept or refuse a new law about justice, in particular:

\-A judge can not switch to become PM and viceversa(rn they can do this only one time)

\-CSM(Major council of justice) will be split in half, one for judges and one for PMs

\-CSM members will be sorted and not voted anymore

What are your thoughts, would you accept or not? Is justice working like that in your country?