Italy’s ‘safe countries of origin’ legislation under CJEU scrutiny: challenging the (un)safety

With the decisions issued on 15 May 2024, the first-tier Court of Florence submitted two preliminary references to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) concerning Italian legislation on ‘safe countries of origin’. The Italian judges asked the CJEU to clarify whether EU law should be interpreted in a way that precludes national legislation, such as the Italian one, which permits the declaration of a third country as a safe country of origin with the exclusion of certain categories of at-risk people.