An Italian Navy ship, which is transporting to the two closed Italian centers in northern Albania asylum seekers who were rescued in the past days in the central Mediterranean, set sail shortly from Lampedusa, the Interior Ministry announced in Rome.

The Italian Ministry of the Interior added that these are men who come from safe countries and do not belong to vulnerable groups.

Those on board the Italian Navy ship Libra will first be taken to the Shenzhen hotspot, near Albania’s border with Montenegro, for identification procedures. They will then be taken to Giarder, a former Albanian Air Force base, where the Italian authorities have set up three new structures. In the first two closed centers, with about a thousand beds, the asylum seekers will wait for the relevant response from the competent authorities. The third is a penitentiary with a capacity of twenty people.

It is recalled that many humanitarian organizations in Italy have underlined that they consider that Italy’s list of “safe countries” also contains many states in which basic human rights are not respected.