Three unaccompanied foreign minors who landed on the island of Lampedusa in the middle of last February, remained closed – without being able to leave – inside the hotspot that houses migrants who arrived in Italy in Contrada Imbriacola, in Lampedusa, for over a month , after identification, but without being immediately hosted in “a government first reception facility intended for them”. At least as the Italian legislation on the subject would provide, which establishes that no minor can be accepted or held in detention centres, hotspots, and in the CPR, the Permanence Centers for Repatriations. More: the law n. 47 of 2017 imagines a single and fast procedure for ascertaining age, with an attribution provision that is issued by the Juvenile Court.
Furthermore, the regulatory framework currently in force establishes that all unaccompanied foreign minors, even if they are not asylum seekers, must be received in a structure of the former Sprar circuit (Protection system for asylum seekers and refugees) which is now called Sai, and which must meet the minimum standards of services and care provided by residential facilities for minors. And instead in this case it did not go like this, as Annapaola Ammirati, an expert in administrative detention who works for the in limine project of the Immigration Legal Studies Association tells TPI: «The three minors held in the Lampedusa hotspot were forced into a condition of social isolation and deprivation of personal liberty for more than a month. They reported having lived in spaces shared with adult citizens, in a situation of gender promiscuity, overcrowding of the structure and unhealthy toilets, without having received specific assistance aimed at the needs of minors and according to their vulnerability”.
A failed policy
Violations of this type the association has documented several of them, not only in Contrada Imbriacola, where one of the hotspots set up in September 2015 by the EU Commission as part of the European Agenda for Migration is located. Initially operating in four landing points, Lampedusa, Trapani, Pozzallo and Taranto, the hotspots have also been established over the years in Augusta, Catania, Reggio Calabria, Messina and Porto Empedocle. And indeed every major landing point, potentially, then became.
The hotspot model functions as a criterion of collective differentiation by nationality. “The monitoring and legal protection activity that we have carried out in recent years has confirmed the systematic nature of the profiles detected and which have just recently been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights”, explains Ammirati. «What we have been witnessing for some time in the centers of Southern Italy are practices of informal classification and illegitimate selection of foreign citizens, between those who can access the right to asylum and who cannot on the basis of nationality, a selection that takes place above all against Tunisian citizens ».
“These are forms of illegal detention, practices harmful to rights that appear to be strongly inherent in the hotspot strategy, and which are implemented by the public security authorities and other actors who operate within the centres”, continues the lawyer.
With practice, the hotspot model has become a real approach to governing migration, which, as dozens of jurists and international protection experts confirmed to TPI, works like this: «The migrants who arrive are interviewed by a team made up by two Frontex experts, a cultural mediator and an Italian police officer who coordinates the group. People are asked some questions that the interviewers report in the so-called news sheet. In particular one. Are you in Italy for economic reasons or for political reasons?».
The case of the Tunisians
But it is for Tunisian citizens, in particular, that there is a real chain of violations. Which goes from an initial condition of isolation and de facto deprivation of personal freedom in hotspots, to detention in the CPR, with the ultimate aim of guaranteeing them a speedy repatriation, thus sacrificing the exercise of the right to asylum and other fundamental rights of the person in the field of outsourcing policies and bilateral relations between Italy and Tunisia. To confirm this hypothesis there is a 2022 dossier created by Avvocati Senza Frontiere, the Tunisian Forum of Economic and Social Rights and by ASGI itself, which revealed how Tunisia remains the main destination for citizens repatriated from Italy, 73 percent. Not only. Furthermore, that the same percentage of Tunisian people, out of the total number of entries each year, is placed within the CPR, in which most of the same interviewees in the study declared that they had suffered abuse and violence, and that they had not even received a mattress and a blanket at the entrance.
“We cannot access the hotspot, like most civil society, but what we know and what we are told by those who live there is a place where rights are not guaranteed”, confirms Marta Bernardini, coordinator of Mediterranean Hope , the migrant program of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy, which has set up an Observatory in the largest of the Pelagie Islands since 2016. «In Lampedusa for years we have been witnessing a scene that repeats itself, unfortunately. Hundreds, sometimes even thousands of people, who arrive at Molo Favaloro, often in worrying physical and psychological conditions, and are transferred to a center that is not suitable for hosting them. A structure that looks more like a detention facility than anything else, “hidden” in the center of the island, from which migrants cannot leave», adds Bernardini.
Guilty verdict
This is the hotspot model on which the Meloni government is focusing, with the intention of expanding it. He tells it the Civil Protection ordinance issued on 16 April which officially establishes a state of emergency for migrants and the appointment as extraordinary commissioner of the prefect Valerio Valenti (head of the secretariat when the undersecretary Antonio D’Alì was at the Viminale, now in prison for the mafia, as the newspaper reported on his own Tomorrow). The Meloni government is focusing on a migration governance approach based on illegitimate detention, unjust detentions and subsequent expulsions. It is the “withhold and expel” model, which just a couple of weeks ago the judges of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected with a sentence.
The center-left Italian government led by Paolo Gentiloni succumbed in the judgment of the ECtHR in 2017. The reason is obvious: for the practices adopted against four people of Tunisian origin who had been detained for ten days in the hotspot on the island of Lampedusa and then hurriedly deported from Palermo airport on 26 October of 2017.
“In the forty-four pages of the judgment of the case”JA and Others versus Italy”, the Court affirms several important principles which also relate well to the current situation in which the Contrada Imbriacola structure in Lampedusa is located. First of all, that the systematic overcrowding in which the hotspot is located does not justify the degrading conditions in which people are held”, explains to TPI the lawyer Loredana Leo who, together with the other Asgi lawyer, Lucia Gennari, oversaw the appeal of four Tunisian men, born between 1989 and 1993. And he concludes: “This sentence also re-establishes the principle of the inviolability of personal freedom, that is, that no one in our legal system can be detained beyond the time established by law without title”.
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