Ministry of the Interior, 21 July 2026

This is the decree that the new Article 28-bis of Legislative Decree 25/2008 required and whose absence caused the border procedure to fail in the first cases before the courts: on that finding the Court of Trieste decided three times in five days (4, 7 and 8 August).

The dates

The decree is dated 21 July 2026, but was published in the Official Gazette only on 10 August: the three Trieste decrees all predate that date and therefore correctly capture the situation then knowable. Two distinct questions remain: from when the decree can be relied on against the applicant, and what becomes of procedures started before 10 August on the basis of the Ministerial Decree of 5 August 2019 alone. The second was answered by the decree of the Court of Trieste of 20 August 2026: the ministerial decree had to exist when the procedure was started, and subsequent publication does not cure the defect.

What it provides

It supplements, it does not replace (Article 1): the decree «supplements the border or transit zones referred to in the Ministerial Decree of 5 August 2019 with those provided for in Article 2». The 2019 ministerial decree therefore remains in place, and with it the designation of the entire provinces of Trieste and Gorizia.

The new zones (Article 2) are identified by reference to two external lists: that of the border crossing points under Article 2, point 8), of Regulation (EU) 2016/399 (Schengen Borders Code) and that of the ports of Annex A to Law 84/1994. The procedures «are carried out in the places designated for that purpose within the zones referred to in paragraph 1 and in the further centres identified in the territories of the provinces referred to in Annex A» — twenty-five provinces, listed at the foot of the decree.

Nineteen new sections of the Territorial Commissions (Article 3), established under Article 4(2-ter) of Legislative Decree 25/2008 and until 14 October 2027, «competent to deal with applications channelled into the accelerated procedure at the border». Their competence is tied to that channelling: if the latter is unlawful, the defect affects the competence of the section that decided.

The designation of the place and the basis for applying the procedure

Article 43 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1348 sets out the conditions of the border procedure; Article 54 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1348, which the decree implements, only the places in which it is carried out. It has therefore been observed in the literature (G. Schiavone) that the decree «cannot turn the identification of those places — and therefore the geographical position of the applicant — into an autonomous precondition of the procedure»: it remains necessary to verify and give reasons as to which case under Article 43 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1348 is in fact met, and where the designation of an entire province were used to derive the applicability of the procedure to all applications there lodged, the court would have to disapply the decree to that extent.

Editorial note. The attached PDF is the official text extracted from the Gazzetta Ufficiale General Series No 184 of 10 August 2026, pp. 33-35 (editorial code 26A04134), also available on the page of the act. The two lists (Schengen crossing points and ports of Law 84/1994) are cited by reference and not reproduced in the decree: to know whether a given port is included, Law 84/1994 must be read.