Diplomats fret as Rome is refusing to take back migrants from Berlin, demanding financial compensation, and talking openly about breaking maritime law to block German rescue ships from Italian ports.
Barely nine weeks after its taking effect in mid-June, the EU’s new Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR) has become a flashpoint in one of the sharpest bilateral rows in recent European migration history. The AMMR was to replace the dysfunctional Dublin system (which places disproportionately hard a burden on countries where migrants arrive first) with something fairer and more durable. It has seen no plain sailing since.
Germany wants to return asylum-seekers to Italy. Italy refuses. Both sides claim the law is on their side, and both are in the right, of sorts. The immediate trigger is modest in scale. Germany wants to transfer three people to Italy who first entered the EU there before later applying for asylum in Germany.
One rulebook, two readings
Rome has indicated it may not allow the migrants to enter the country and may instead send them straight back to Germany. A planned such transfer of a Somali woman, reportedly due on 19 August, did not take place.
The legal stakes are anything but modest. Germany bases its position on the AMMR’s core principle: the country of first entry bears responsibility for examining an asylum claim. A German Interior Ministry spokesman stated that “The functioning of the Dublin system is an indispensable condition for the success of the Common European Asylum System.”
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Berlin also points to the AMMR’s extended transfer window—up to 36 months, up from six under the old Dublin III rules—as justification for acting swiftly. Rome, for its part, invokes a bilateral understanding reached in December 2025, sometimes called the ‘Dubliners’ amnesty’, which it says extinguishes all pre-12 June take-back claims.
The Italian Interior Ministry said flatly that “All alleged Dublin migrants who moved before 12 June are covered by the bilateral amnesty; there are therefore zero returns due.” Rome also argues that post-12 June cases are too recent for establishing responsibility under the new rules.
The dual-regime trap
The result is a legal standoff with roots in what lawyers call a ‘dual regime’ problem. Under Article 92 of the AMMR, applications lodged before 12 June remain subject to Dublin III rules, while those lodged after fall under the new regulation. That transitional seam is now a battleground, with each side reading the same text to reach opposite conclusions.
The functioning of the Dublin system is an indispensable condition for the success of the Common European Asylum System. — German interior ministry
Italy has widened the dispute well beyond the three pending transfers. Its Interior Ministry has released figures claiming that since Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni took office in October 2022, German aid organisations have brought around 22,500 migrants to Italian ports — out of a total of about 42,300 people brought to Italy on private rescue ships during the same period.
Rome puts the German share at almost two-thirds of all migrant arrivals by private rescue vessels. This number includes ships sailing under the German flag but in service of other European organisations. Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has made it clear that Italy does not want to discuss taking back migrants from Germany until the issue of financial responsibility has seen a solution.
The price of rescue
Mr Piantedosi has asked German authorities to provide funds to help care for migrants pegged for return to Italy under EU rules. Germany has not agreed to any such financial contribution to date, while Mr Piantedosi continues talks with his German counterpart, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt.
Italy’s firebrand Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has gone further. He announced that if Germany failed to cooperate, he would seek financial assistance from Berlin to provide care for migrants rescued in Italian waters by German-flagged ships. Mr Salvini also called on the governments in Berlin and Madrid to “rein in” their aid organisations, arguing that they should no longer be allowed to bring illegal immigrants to the Italian coast.
Mr Salvini added that Italy could refuse safe harbour to German-flagged rescue vessels if Berlin failed to act. That threat carries a legal sting of its own. Any vessel in open waters must adhere to the laws of its flag country, which also implies that the flag country bears responsibility for all people on board, including anyone rescued at sea.
Threats with legal limits
But if Italy were to refuse safe harbour to rescue ships, it would breach international maritime law and face sanctions. Mr Salvini’s threat is thus politically pointed but legally precarious. According to the International Organization for Migration, at least 872 people have died or gone missing on the central Mediterranean route so far this year. The actual number is likely higher, since not all incidents are recorded.
All alleged Dublin migrants who moved before 12 June are covered by the bilateral amnesty; there are therefore zero returns due. — Italian foreign ministry
The Italian organisation Emergency recently reported seven deaths on an overcrowded boat off the Libyan coast, with 57 people rescued, two of them in a critical condition. The German organisations Sea-Watch and Resqship also reported finding three bodies in the Mediterranean. Italian authorities argue that private rescue vessels incentivise migrants to embark on the dangerous crossings in the first place.
The AMMR includes a solidarity mechanism. It is mandatory in principle, but flexible in practice; but that allows member states to contribute through relocations, financial payments, or operational support rather than simply accepting returned migrants. Italy appears to treat the NGO rescue figures as grounds for invoking that mechanism in its favour.
Solidarity without a price tag
The regulation, however, separates the legal question of responsibility for examining asylum applications from the political question of solidarity contributions. Rome’s compensation demand may carry domestic force without a clear legal anchor in the text of the regulation itself.
The wider pact package includes the Crisis and Force-Majeure Regulation (Regulation 2024/1359), the recast Reception Conditions Directive (Directive 2024/1346), and the Eurodac Recast (Regulation 2024/1358). It gives the Commission tools to monitor compliance and support member states under pressure. Human-rights organisations have warned that the pact’s accelerated procedures and extended detention risk eroding protection standards.
The Commission stresses that solidarity under the AMMR is mandatory but has not yet moved toward formal infringement action under Article 258 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Despite the heat, both governments say they want a negotiated outcome.
Diplomacy under strain
Following a phone call with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said the two sides agreed on “the need to ensure maximum protection of Europe’s external borders”. Mr Piantedosi and Mr Dobrindt are expected to hold further talks in the coming days.
Using controlled returns, we will stop illegal migration and end the business of people-smuggling. — Alexander Dobrindt, Germany’s interior minister
Ms Meloni has said that “We will continue deportations of irregular migrants and strengthen border protection.” The wording signals resolve without closing the door to a deal. Mr Dobrindt, speaking at a trilateral meeting with his Italian and French counterparts in April, said that “Using controlled returns, we will stop illegal migration and end the business of people-smuggling.”
The deeper question the row exposes is whether the AMMR can hold together a system that asks frontline states to bear the cost of first entry while promising solidarity that has, so far, proved easier to legislate than to deliver.
Credibility at stake
Legally, both sides operate in a grey zone between the outgoing Dublin III and the incoming AMMR regime. Politically, the clash embodies the broader challenge the Pact was meant to solve: reconciling frontline states’ concerns about disproportionate pressure with northern states’ insistence on curbing secondary movements.
Whether the EU’s new solidarity toolbox can break this deadlock will shape the credibility of the Pact, and of EU migration governance as a whole, in the years to come.
