Abstract: The Italian Parliament has recently passed the Law No. 146/2014, intended – inter alia – to amend and integrate relevant rules of the Legislative Decree No. 25/2008, implementing the European Directive 2005/85/EC regarding minimum standards on procedures in Member States for granting and withdrawing refugee status. These amendments are aimed at enhancing both the quality and effectiveness of the international protection determination procedure, which have been sharply lowered as a consequence of the dramatic increase of applications following the Lampedusa disaster in October 2013 and the launching of the seaborne operation Mare Nostrum. The overloading of the Italian asylum system has sorely jeopardised the capacity of the Territorial Commissions (i.e. the bodies competent for the exam of protection requests and the recognition of international protection) to cope with a growing number of applications, determining disparity in treatment among protection seekers under Italian jurisdiction and the lengthening of waiting times for first instance decisions. This emergency situation has exploded the structural criticalities of both the Italian reception system and its international protection determination procedures, already censured by the European Commission, through respectively the infringement proceedings No. 2012/2189 (24 October 2012) and the query EU Pilot No. 4684/13/HOME. This article analyses the new rules amending and integrating the Legislative Decree No. 25/2008 in response to the Commission’s criticism and provides an appraisal of what is still to be done to meet the European protection standard, also in light of the jurisprudence of the ECJ and the ECHR. In addition, it takes into account the forthcoming implementation by Italy of the European Directives 2013/32/EU on common procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection (recast) and 2013/33/EU laying down standards for the reception of applicants for international protection (recast), both adopted on 26 June 2013 in the framework of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and makes some conclusive remarks on the ‘awkward’ dynamics of enforcement of the norm enshrined in Article 10, para. 3, of the Italian Constitution.
