Bologna Ordinary Court, decision of 5 December 2025, R.G. No. 923/2025
For a UK audience, the paradigm “Integration or ReImmigrazione” should be read as a legal-operational framework, not as a political slogan. A preliminary clarification is essential: ReImmigrazione is a brand and a defined legal concept, not a generic term for “return” and not a translation of other European notions such as remigration. It is deliberately left untranslated.
The paradigm reflects how the Italian—and more broadly European—legal system already functions: lawful residence is conditional upon effective integration; where integration is absent, lawful return remains the system’s default outcome.
This logic emerges clearly from a recent decision of the Tribunale di Bologna, delivered on 5 December 2025 (R.G. No. 923/2025), concerning the application of protezione complementare (complementary protection).
Complementary protection in the European legal context
For UK lawyers, it is important to avoid false analogies with discretionary leave or broad humanitarian relief. Italian complementary protection is rights-based, not policy-based. It derives from Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and operates through a structured proportionality assessment.
The court must determine whether removal would amount to a disproportionate interference with an individual’s private and family life, where that life has already become established in the host state. Crucially, the protection does not aim to facilitate integration prospectively. It applies only once integration has already occurred in fact.
The Bologna court makes this explicit: integration is the legal precondition of protection, not its product.
Integration as a legal threshold
The reasoning adopted by the court will be familiar to a UK public-law audience. Integration is treated as an evidential threshold, assessed through objective factors: stable employment, economic self-sufficiency, lawful conduct, family and social ties, and the absence of public-order concerns.
When this threshold is met, the State’s power to remove is legally constrained. When it is not, no such constraint arises. There is no automatic right to remain.
This is the core of the paradigm “Integration or ReImmigrazione”: integration operates as a legal condition for continued residence; its absence reactivates the legitimacy of removal.
ReImmigrazione versus ideological “remigration”
In UK debates, continental discussions around “remigration” are often viewed with scepticism, particularly where they imply collective or automatic return measures. Such approaches would sit uneasily with principles of individual assessment, proportionality, and procedural fairness.
ReImmigrazione, as used here, is fundamentally different. It does not imply collective return, nor does it rest on ideology. It denotes the individual legal outcome that follows when a person fails to meet the integration-based criteria required to limit the State’s removal powers.
Complementary protection and ReImmigrazione therefore do not contradict each other. They are alternative outcomes within the same rule-based system, triggered by different factual circumstances.
Relevance for a UK audience
The Bologna decision illustrates a migration framework that avoids both extremes: unconditional permanence on the one hand, indiscriminate enforcement on the other. Instead, it applies a conditional, rules-based model in which rights follow responsibility and legal status follows demonstrable integration.
For UK observers, this offers a useful comparative perspective. The judgment confirms that migration control need not rely on political discretion alone: it can be structured through clear legal thresholds and individualised judicial scrutiny.
The decision of 5 December 2025 (R.G. No. 923/2025) shows that “Integration or ReImmigrazione” is not a theoretical construct. It is already embedded in judicial practice. The law does not merely ask whether a person is present on the territory, but whether that presence has acquired legal substance.
Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Lawyer – Italy
Registered EU Transparency Register Lobbyist
ID 280782895721-36
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