Refugee Protection Regimes: Italy Country Report

The report explores the impact of the recent migration flows on the asylum and international protection regimes in Italy during the years 2011-2017 and also seeks to identify some best practices and policy recommendations. Through empirical evidence, statistics, expert interviews, discourse analysis and an overview of academic literature, the report examines the response of the Italian authorities to the growing number of applications for international protection (and therefore, the consequent growth of a strong anti-immigrant narrative). In particular, when comparing the legal framework and its effective implementation, the report stresses the existence of 3 different dimensions of the concept of protection in the Italian experience: - the constitutional dimension: at the top of the Italian system of the sources of law, Art.10, par. 3 of the Italian Constitution recognizes the right of asylum for every foreigner who, in his/her country, is denied the effective exercise of the democratic freedoms established by the Constitution itself; - the international and supranational dimension: for the purpose of implementing the Geneva Convention of 1951 as well as EU Law (inter alia, Art. 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Directive 2004/83/EC), Italian legislation introduced 2 forms of international protection: refugee and subsidiary protection (in particular, Legislative Decrees nos. 251/2007 and 142/2015); - the domestic legislative dimension: in addition to the types of protection deriving from international and supranational law, domestic legislation has introduced some specific forms of protection, and in particular humanitarian protection (Art. 5 of the Consolidated Act of provisions concerning immigration introduced humanitarian protection). In 2018, Decree-Law no. 113/2018 abolished the humanitarian protection. Currently, the art. 20 of the Consolidated Act identifies 7 cases in which a national temporary permit to stay could be issued for specific reasons.