European asylum pact, Finland sends back to Italy migrants registered in Italy

The news currently comes from a single source (the ANSA agency); no independent confirmation is available: both the dispatch carried by Musicletter’s press review and the wire published by ANSA trace back to the same primary source. We state this because the fact is politically significant and, as things stand, rests on a single leg.

The fact is this: according to the August 20th wire, Finland is the fourth European country to send back to Italy migrants registered on Italian territory. The reason given by the Finnish authorities is strict compliance with common rules: “The rules of the EU pact must be applied and everyone must fulfil their own obligations.”

The mechanism. The new European migration and asylum pact assigns a decisive role to the place where a person was first registered. Anyone entering the Union from an external border state and identified there, if they later file a claim elsewhere, may be sent back to the country of initial registration. For Italy, which is a country of first entry on one of the main routes, this means that strict application of the rules produces return flows towards its territory, not away from it.

This is the political point raised by the opposition. The president of the Movimento 5 Stelle, Giuseppe Conte, listed Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Finland among the countries that are sending back to Italy people registered in Italy, summing up the matter with a polemical remark about returns that, in his view, are working in the wrong direction for the Italian government.

A discrepancy between the two available figures should be noted. The agency wire describes Finland as the fourth country to start the transfers; Conte’s list names five, including Switzerland, which is not a member state of the European Union. The difference may depend on the counting criterion — which transfers have already begun and which have only been announced — but in the material available there is no official record allowing one to establish which of the two figures is correct. We record both.

Italy’s transposition. In Italy the European pact was transposed with the migration decree of June 12th, 2026, number 100. This is the step that closes the circle: the very regulatory framework that the Italian government incorporated into national law is the one that other member states are now invoking to organise transfers towards Italy. Neither fact contradicts the other on the legal level — a pact applies in every direction — but on the political level it produces the effect that the opposition highlights.

What we don’t know. The figures are missing. The available sources do not indicate how many people have actually been transferred to Italy from each of the countries mentioned, over what period of time, nor how many requests for take-back have been accepted or rejected by the Italian authorities. Without these figures it is not possible to establish whether this is a matter of isolated cases or of a structured flow: the difference between the two hypotheses completely changes the weight of the story.

An official reaction from the Italian government is also missing from the material consulted. For now, the comparison is between the position of a European government that says it is applying the rules and that of an Italian opposition party denouncing its effect.

The next useful check is documentary: data on transfers carried out between member states under the new pact, once published, will show whether Finland is indeed the fourth country and how many cases each transfer involves. Until then, the only certain figure in this story is the date of the Italian transposition decree: June 12th, 2026.