Author
The Reception Decree sets out the reception standards for third-country nationals making an application for international protection on the territory, including at the borders and in the transit zones or in Italian territorial waters.[1]
It provides that reception conditions apply from the moment a third-country national manifests their will to apply for international protection and declares that they have no economic means to guarantee theirs and their family’s survival.[2] The criteria of destitution is to be evaluated by the Prefecture, by comparing the financial resources of the applicant(s) and the amount of the annual social allowance (assegno sociale annuo).[3]
In practice, no assessment of financial resources is carried out when the asylum applicant makes their application, or even when they access the system; both Prefectures and the SAI Central Service customarily consider the self-declaration as sufficient. However, during the accommodation period, Prefectures are required to verify that the conditions, including economic conditions, which have determined access still occur. In 2023, similarly to previous years, this has resulted in a worrying number of withdrawals of reception conditions (see below).
According to the Reception Decree, no additional requirements than those expressly listed in the decree can be asked to grant access to reception measures.[4]
For this reason, it is important to highlight that Law 187/2024 modified the Reception Decree introducing a hypothesis of exclusion from reception measures for those who, without justified reason, apply for asylum after 90 days of entering Italy.[5] The law expressly refers to the new provision of a new accelerated procedure for those who enter Italy illegally and apply for asylum after 90 days.[6] So, it seems that it should apply only to those who have entered Italy illegally. The exclusion decision must be taken in writing and motivated by the territorially competent Prefecture. It must take into account the vulnerability of the applicant. Even if the rule recalls art. 20 of the Reception Directive, it does not respect its content since while the Directive provides for a mere hypothesis of reduction of reception measures, the rule regulates the exclusion from reception measures.
Moreover, Law 187/2024 – formalizing an already existing practice – introduced a priority criterion for access to reception facilities for people rescued at sea, making access to the reception of all other people (arrived by land, with autonomous disembarkations, Dublin returnees, etc.) subject to the availability of non-reserved places.[7]
In this regard, after the entry into force of the law, the Ministry of the Interior has issued a Circular Note[8] with which it invites all Prefectures to take into account this criterion of priority entry into reception facilities. However, the Circular refers to mere entry (and not irregular entry) in the 90 days prior to the asylum request as a criterion for exclusion from reception.
However, some Prefectures, such as the one in Siena, have already gone beyond the scope of the new rule by providing for additional exclusion criteria. According to the Note spread by the Prefecture of Siena on 14 January 2025: 1) asylum applicants with mental disease can only be admitted upon presentation of a certificate from the competent health district attesting to compatibility with their presence in a facility that does not have health requirements; 2) Dublin asylum applicants have access to the facilities on a subordinate basis to asylum applicants whose Italian responsibility has already been declared.
On March 2025 ASGI has submitted an appeal against the note.
As already mentioned, government centres and temporary centres (CARA, CAS and CdA) can only accommodate asylum applicants. SAI facilities, instead, are now conceived to accommodate beneficiaries of international protection (refugee status and subsidiary protection), unaccompanied foreign minors and, in case of available places, to vulnerable asylum applicants, to asylum applicants who legally entered Italy through complementary pathways (government-led resettlements or private sponsored humanitarian admission programs) and to holders of the following national permits and complementary protections:[9]
- Special Protection (Consolidated Act on Immigration, Article 19 (1 and 1.1) a Legislative Decree 251/2007, Article 16)
- Medical treatment (Consolidated Act on Immigration, Article 19 (2 d-bis)
- Social protection for trafficking in human beings (Consolidated Act on Immigration, Article 18)
- Social protection for domestic violence (Consolidated Act on Immigration, Article 18-bis)
- Disaster (Consolidated Act on Immigration, Article 20-bis)
- Significant labour exploitation (Consolidated Act on Immigration, Article 22 (12-quater)
- Acts of exceptional civil value (Consolidated Act on Immigration, Article 42-bis)
- Special cases (D.L. 113/2018, Article 1 (9).
Applicants for international protection subject to a Dublin procedure (both incoming and outgoing) can access the reception system (but no longer SAI centres unless they belong to vulnerable categories, within the limits of available places, as provided by the national legislation for the rest of asylum applicants) at the same conditions as the other asylum applicants with no places reserved.[10] (See Dublin).
Access to the reception system may follow different procedures.
- For asylum applicants who has just landed on Italian territory after Search and rescue operations, access to the system is, so to speak, automatic. However, due to the so-called hotspot approach and the use of informative sheets (“foglio notizie”) not translated nor explained to migrants, it is not uncommon for people who have expressed their intention to seek asylum to be sent to CPRs.[11] When accommodated, the following placement follows a national and regional dispersion policy, which should follow agreed criteria (see Dispersal of asylum applicants).
- In cases where the asylum applicant interested in receiving reception is already present on the national territory, the request to access the system is processed by the State Police office where they are present or have a domicile. In these cases, the new provision introduced by article 4 of the DL 133/2023[12] negatively impacts asylum applicants’ possibilities to access the asylum procedure. According to this rule, in case asylum applicants do not present themselves at the Questura to lodge the asylum application, the previously expressed intention to seek asylum does not constitute an application according to the Procedures Decree. In practice, in these cases, it rarely happens that accommodation is granted immediately after the expression of the intention to seek asylum and, waiting for an address to be connected to the asylum applicant, even the formalisation is postponed for weeks or months during which people are left without any assistance. In order not to live on the street, people accept temporary hospitality or try to formalise their application before other Questure and, when coming back to the competent one, find that their asylum application and their accommodation request do not exist anymore. They are then requested to register again, with the risk in some cases that their application is considered as a subsequent one.
- Due to the new law provision introduced by L 187/2024,[13] these asylum applicants access accommodation measures subject to the availability of non-reserved places to people rescued at sea.
- If the people who need access to the reception system are already holders of a permit for protection, they must contact the SAI Central Service, through the local Prefecture, or through the CAS/SAI managing bodies, by lawyers, or by other public or private bodies. However, the reporting procedures are far from perfect and frequently, reports are made several times at once by different subjects, and thus the Central Service is not able to process them correctly. Moreover, the pace at which the Central Service processes a request and assigns the place in reception is often very slow, mostly due to communication problems, to the point that migrants often opt to directly present themselves at a SAI project and ask for admission, rather than waiting for an assignment from the central offices. In fact, as has recently emerged,[14] the Central Service does not count the number of requests for access it receives, which makes allocating the available places according to set priority criteria quite challenging given the large number of requests. Besides this, not all Prefectures consider that they should report to the SAI the presence of beneficiaries of protection in their territory of competence, and, in the best case, Prefectures only report the transfer in SAI of people that are already accommodated in CAS activated by them in their territories. The Ministry of the Interior periodically sends operational indications to the Prefectures on reporting regarding reception in SAI.
- Moreover, after the Cutro Decree (DL 20/2023) came into force, the passage from CAS or first governmental centres to SAI centres for asylum applicants has been impeded and it is not rare that, after the recognition of a title of protection people are ordered to leave the accommodation project without even checking for availability of places in SAI projects. Once out of the accommodation system it is then very difficult to re-access it. During 2024 many people were ordered to leave CAS and Governmental centres immediately after obtaining the recognition of international or national protection.
Italy-Albania deal
Through L. 14 of 21 February 2024, the Italian Parliament ratified the Protocol signed in Rome on 6 November 2023 between the Italian and the Albanian Government aimed at cooperation on migration matters.[15] This introduced a further variable in the reception process for those who intend to request international protection: people rescued in international waters by Italian ships,[16] subject to the border procedure, will be transported directly to Albania where, according to the agreement, three centres were established under Italian jurisdiction: one, in the locality of Shengjin, to provide health screening, identification and collection of asylum applications and two others in the locality of Gjader, one functioning as accommodation centre (880 places) and the other one as repatriation centre (CPR) (144 places).
During 2024, 62 persons were sent to the Albanian centres, but the Civil Court of Rome, first, and the Court of Appeal of Rome, later, never validated their detention orders and both asked for a preliminary judgement to the CJEU (See Procedures).
Reception and obstacles to accessing the asylum procedure
Barriers to access to reception in Italy mostly depend on two main factors:
- Bureaucratic and administrative obstacles to access to the international protection procedure.
- Shortage of available places and management issues within the various levels of the reception system.
As described in detail under Registration of the asylum application, for years, the Italian Police Headquarters (Questure) have put in place various strategies aimed at limiting and delaying access to the asylum procedure for people who spontaneously show up at the offices. These practices, which intensify with increasing numbers of requests for protection (both at the general national level and at the level of the individual Questura), also have direct consequences on another right of applicants, namely the right to reception conditions. While applicants are often forced to wait months to file their asylum applications, the same if not worse applies to making a request to access reception conditions. Even though by law asylum applicants are entitled to material reception conditions immediately after manifesting the will to apply for asylum (making phase), access to reception facilities is often postponed until at least after the actual registration and lodging of the application by State Police.[17] Only after being registered can asylum applicants request access to reception facilities; even then, they are frequently required to wait for some additional weeks, sleeping rough or in makeshift lodgings or resorting to members of the same community, if and when they can afford it.[18]
The shortage of places in the reception system is a recurring issue in Italy, especially as, due to policies aimed at reducing public spending and a strong lack of medium-long-term planning (see the Management and Coordination), the total number of places in the system continues to decrease, and emergency situations are registered each summer. For this reason, the system quickly became saturated, and Prefectures started refusing requests to access reception, or in some cases ignoring them. A recent inquiry by the magazine Altreconomia[19] estimated that, in a situation where thousands of asylum applicants were left without access to reception measures, and while the Italian Government has declared on several occasions that “there are no more places available in the system(s)”, at least 5,000 places were left unoccupied in 2022 as a reserve for unexpected arrivals through disembarkations.
According to the data shared by the MOI Department of Civil Liberties after a FOIA request made by ASGI, as of 31 December 2024, out of the 96,890 places available, only 95,453 were actually occupied.
At least three factors, which have characterised the Italian reception system since its creation, affect the functioning of the system and the possibility for asylum applicants to access reception centres. As better detailed in the next dedicated paragraph, they can be summarised as follows:
- Although the provision of reception measures is mandatory, the activation of SAI facilities is determined on a voluntary basis: Municipalities can decide whether to adhere to the SAI network and have full discretion as to the extension, increase or reduction of the existing places, regardless of the reception needs that emerge on the national territory and in the single territories;
- The chronic unavailability of places in SAI results in the need for local Prefectures to prepare temporary measures and set up government reception centres (CAS), but the drastically lowered costs provided by the tender specifications schemes for reception in these facilities have de facto favoured the creation of large centres managed by multinationals or for-profit organisations and excluded many of the small non-profit and professional organisations and cooperatives from the accommodation landscape.
- The conceptualisation of reception obligations as an emergency to be faced in the short term – and the unconcealed intentions to limit arrivals – have so far prevented serious and reasoned interventions on the implementation of an efficient accommodation system able to face the numbers of arrivals which periodically and systematically increase.
- The absence of transparency on the updated availability of places in the CAS and the absence of willingness on the part of the Prefectures to look for the availability of reception places in territories other than the one under their jurisdiction, prevents people from directly requesting and obtaining assignment to a place in the national system, usually having to wait for the waiting list present at the individual prefectures.
As a direct consequence, the number of places in the ordinary reception system is largely insufficient when compared to the existing needs. Another issue is that, even if the places are in theory available in a region other than the one in which the applicant is located, the competent prefecture have no means to be made aware of the existence of additional places in case the central authority does not respond to their request. On many occasions, the prefecture does not proactively present this request to the central administration.
In this situation, the regulatory provision introduced by Law 187/2024, which gives priority to the reception of asylum applicants rescued at sea, will contribute to giving formal support to an already existing practice and will allow the prefectures to justify the refusal to enter the reception on this legal basis which appears not compatible with the Reception Directive.
Reception of applicants subject to accelerated procedures
Italian legislation does not provide for specific or differentiated reception forms for asylum applicants who are subjected to the accelerated procedure.
However, it must be emphasized that, in almost all cases in which the asylum application is processed with an accelerated procedure, any appeal filed against the rejection of the application for international protection by the territorial commissions does not entail the automatic suspension of the effects of the rejection decisions[20] and this has direct repercussions on the right to reception because, if the request for suspension is not accepted by the competent Court, the applicant loses access to reception conditions.
However, it should also be noted that, after the judgment of the Court of Cassation in United Sections no. 11399/2024, most of the Courts held that exceeding the terms of the accelerated procedure by the public administration involves the restoration of the ordinary procedure and therefore the automatic suspensive effect of the appeal. (See Accelerated procedure)
Reception at second instance
Regarding appellants, the Reception Decree provides that accommodation is ensured until a decision is taken by the Territorial Commission (the first instance deciding authority) and, in case of a rejection of the asylum application, until the expiration of the timeframe to lodge an appeal before the Civil Court. When the appeal has automatic suspensive effect, accommodation is guaranteed to the appellant until the court gives judgement.
However, when appeals have no automatic suspensive effect, the applicant can request an ad hoc suspension to the Court and remain in the reception centre until a decision on the suspensive request is taken by the competent judge. If this request receives a positive answer, then, the applicant is authorised to stay in the Italian territory for the rest of the procedure and has the right to remain in the reception centre where they already live.[21]
Concerning reception during onward appeals, following Decree Law 13/2017, implemented by L 46/2017, the withdrawal of accommodation to asylum applicants whose claims have been rejected at first appeal has become very common. Usually, Courts do not recognise the suspensive effect of the appeal within a short time frame (see Regular Procedure: Appeal).
[1] Article 1(1) Reception Decree.
[2] Article 1(2) Reception Decree.
[3] Article 14(1) and (3) Reception Decree. The Social Allowance is an economic contribution of a welfare nature provided by the National Institute for Social Security (Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale, INPS) for 13 months to all those who are in poor economic conditions. For the year 2022, the amount corresponded to € 6,097.39 and corresponds to € 6,542.51 for 2023.
[4] Article 4(4) Reception Decree.
[5] Article 15 quinquies Decree Law 145/2024 as amended by L. 187/2024 and introducing Article 1 (2 bis) to the Reception Decree.
[6] Article 28 bis (2) lett. e bis.
[7] Article 15 quinquies Decree Law 145/2024 as amended by L. 187/2024 and introducing Article 8 ( 2 bis) to the Reception Decree.
[8] MoI Circular note, 22 January 2025.
[9] Article 1-sexies(1) Decree Law 416/1989, as modified by Decree Law 130/2020.
[10] Article 1(3) Reception Decree. For more information about access to reception for Dublin transferees, please see the relevant paragraph in the Procedures chapter.
[11] The hotspot procedure, to which most people disembarked are subjected, is known to force some individuals into irregularity, to the extent that some migrants are systematically prevented from seeking asylum. This, of course, also produces an immediate exclusion from reception conditions. For more information, see the Procedures chapter.
[12] Introducing Article 6 (3-bis) to the procedure decree.
[13] Article 8 ( 2 bis) to the Reception Decree introduced by L. 187/2024.
[14] See Altreconomia, Scarsa programmazione, posti vuoti e persone al freddo: così ai migranti è negata l’accoglienza, 8 February 2023, available at: https://bit.ly/3oXlaUx.
[15] L. 14/2024, available at: bit.ly/44vBGfr.
[16] According to Article 3 (2) L. 14/2024, those are the ones who could be subject to the procedure.
[17] In Italy, the registration and lodging phases are integrated into one step.
[18] For more information, see MSF, Fuori campo, February 2018, available in Italian at: http://bit.ly/2Gagwa2; Fuori campo, March 2016, available in Italian at: http://bit.ly/2letTQd, 11; ANCI et al., Rapporto sulla protezione internazionale in Italia, 2014, available in Italian at: http://bit.ly/15k6twe, 124.
[19] Altreconomia, Inchiesta sull’accoglienza selettiva: chi arriva in Italia via terra resta fuori, in Altreconomia 254, December 2022, available at: https://bit.ly/42bf2XP.
[20] According to Article 35 bis (3) Procedure Decree.
[21] Article 14(4) Reception Decree.