Introduction

Through judgments nos. 616 and 617 of 2026 of the Veneto Regional Administrative Tribunal, the tribunal ruled that administrative inefficiency is not an inevitability due to a lack of resources, but an unlawful organisational choice. The rulings, stemming from a class action brought by the Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration (ASGI) and supported by other third-sector organisations, set a fundamental precedent that could lead to a systemic change in the way police headquarters handle asylum applications across the country.

The Class Action

In March 2025, a class action was brought against the police headquarters in Vicenza and Venice, initiated by lawyers from ASGI and joined by a number of civil society organisations working to protect migrants’ rights: Emergency, CADUS and Lungo la Rotta Balcanica for the Venice area; CADUS, with the support of Casa di Amadou, OXFAM ITALIA and Spazi Circolari, for the Vicenza area.

The central complaint raised before the Regional Administrative Tribunal concerned the practical impediment to accessing the international protection procedure, a critical issue that emerged from a national monitoring exercise by ASGI, which had highlighted how the obstacle to the ‘formalisation’ of the request for international protection was the primary cause of a chain of subsequent violations, including the denial of reception measures and the impossibility of obtaining regular residence permits. From a strictly legal perspective, the formalisation of the application for protection does not represent a mere subsidiary formality, but rather the constitutive act that guarantees the foreign national legal certainty and the regularity of their stay on national territory, in accordance with Article 10 of the Constitution and the EU directives transposed into Legislative Decree 25/2008.

Current legislation is extremely strict regarding the timeframes for administrative procedures: once an individual has expressed their intention to seek protection, the public security authority is obliged to formalise the application (by completing the so-called C3 form) within three working days, a period that may be extended to ten days only in cases of an exceptional influx of applicants. This timeframe is designed to prevent the individual from being left in a state of documentary limbo that would render them ‘invisible’ to the state. The practice denounced by the associations, however, describes a system in which the transition from expressing intent to its formalisation was subject to appointments scheduled at a distance of several months, during which the applicant was not issued any documentation certifying their legal status as a lawful resident. This time lag not only violates the principle of legality, but exposes the individual to the risk of expulsion and precludes them from accessing the National Health Service and the formal labour market, effectively stripping the right to asylum of its vital substance even before the application can be assessed on its merits.

Organisational Deficiencies as a Structural Breach

The body of evidence on which the class action was based consists of objective data collected over a long period of observation at the immigration offices in Venice and Vicenza. The findings documented a dramatic disconnect between operational reality and regulatory requirements: in Venice, the average waiting time for the formalisation of an application was approximately 90 days, whilst in Vicenza the procedural delay reached eight months. Far from being linked to isolated emergency peaks, these delays were framed by the applicant associations as the result of consistently poor administrative management. The documentation produced highlighted that the inefficiency was not an accidental phenomenon, but an endemic condition that shifted the consequences of inadequate resource planning onto the asylum seeker. In this context, the legal action sought to demonstrate that the administration was not merely accumulating delays, but was unlawfully restricting a fully vested right by imposing administrative barriers not provided for by law, such as informal booking systems or limited distribution of daily access numbers. This state of bureaucratic deadlock has been described in the appeals as a breach of the duties of fairness and good administration enshrined in Article 97 of the Constitution.

The argument put forward by the associations’ lawyers, and subsequently upheld by the Regional Administrative Court, emphasised the clear disproportion between the organisational structure put in place by the Ministry of the Interior and the foreseeable volume of applications for protection. It was argued that the public administration has a duty to adapt its resources in order to ensure the effective enjoyment of fundamental rights, and that a lack of staff or funds cannot constitute a perpetual justification for failing to comply with statutory deadlines. The significance of this preliminary phase lies in having transformed the individual hardship faced by individual migrants into a matter of general public law, demonstrating that the inefficiency of a police headquarters is not merely a logistical problem, but a systematic violation of the principles of the rule of law that undermines human dignity.

Judgments Nos. 616 and 617 of 2026

In Judgments Nos. 616 and 617 of 18 March 2026, the Regional Administrative Court of Veneto delivered an unprecedented ruling against the Police Headquarters of Venice and Vicenza, finding a breach of statutory provisions and ordering the immediate restoration of legality. The crucial point in the judges’ legal reasoning lies in their definition of the Ministry’s conduct as ‘not merely an occasional organisational dysfunction, but a structural one’. The Regional Administrative Tribunal has made it unequivocally clear that repeated delays cannot be attributed to force majeure, but stem from specific “internal organisational choices within the Administration” which have proved wholly inadequate in relation to the required effort. This decision is revolutionary because it removes the issue of delays from the sphere of administrative discretion: the efficiency of immigration offices is elevated to a requirement for the validity of public action, and its absence is sanctioned as a breach of duty that obliges the State to undertake a profound restructuring of its services.

The rulings impose a strict 90-day deadline on police headquarters to clear waiting lists and ensure that access to their offices for those concerned is provided in accordance with the law. The Administration has been ordered to implement measures to facilitate the processing of applications, ensuring the prompt issuance of receipts and the complete clearance of the backlog. The Tribunal’s decision is therefore not limited to a financial or formal penalty, but acts as an injunction, imposing a change in management approach. The Regional Administrative Tribunal emphasised that the organisation of the offices must be ‘suitable and adequate’, reversing the burden of proof: it is not the citizen who must bear the brunt of the State’s shortcomings, but the State that must demonstrate it has put in place every possible means to comply with the law.

This ruling also marks the success of the first genuine public class action brought by civil society actors in the field of immigration law, confirming the legal standing of associations to intervene to correct the malfunctions of the state apparatus when these harm collective interests and inviolable human rights.

Conclusions

The significance of these rulings lies in the reaffirmation of the principle that fundamental rights cannot be held hostage to chronic bureaucratic inefficiency. Judgments Nos. 616 and 617 of 2026 of the Veneto Regional Administrative Tribunal mark a point of no return in Italian administrative case law, as they establish that the proper functioning of organisational processes is a necessary precondition for the exercise of democracy. By putting an end to the legal limbo in which thousands of people have been forced to remain due to delays by the police headquarters, the Court has restored the centrality of human dignity and legal certainty. This legal victory demonstrates that class action can serve as a lever to dismantle entrenched unlawful administrative practices, raising the level of accountability required of public institutions. Ultimately, the value of this verdict lies in the warning it sends to the entire public administration: internal organisation is not an unquestionable domain, but must always be guided and shaped by the effective guarantee of the rights enshrined in the Constitution.