Court for Refugees? The Un-Expected Role of Italian First Instance Courts in Migration Governance

The Italian asylum adjudication procedure has been modified in 2017 in order to respond to an overhead justice system, which had faced a consisting growth in asylum appeals since 2015. Particularly, the 2017 reform sets up specialized sections within Italian tribunals dealing with migration issues and in particular with asylum appeals. Such specialized sections have gradually become crucial institutions in implementing Italian asylum policies, while judges allocated to these sections have become decisive decision makers able to impact on the whole implementation of asylum adjudication policies. For this reason, by considering the inherent peculiarity of asylum decision-making and the unicity of this specific category of decision-makers, the present contribution seeks to analyse the implementation of such specific asylum policy, with the understanding that it could have a wider impact on the whole Italian and European asylum adjudication process. Particularly, the work wants to focus on possible effects of the divergent implementation of the national asylum policies and possible impacts on Italian asylum adjudications. Moreover, from a broader perspective, it also seeks to understand if these divergences could have possible implications in expanding or reducing asylum seekers rights. The starting point for the analysis is the 2018 report on the process of implementation of the policy issued by the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura, which was charged with the implementation by the Ministry of Justice. Indeed, the report brings out some relevant differences in the implementation process among tribunals, which deserve to be considered since discrepancies concern many crucial aspects of the asylum determination process, such as oral hearings, sources of information and differences in terms of competences.