Easter Putignano and Gavino Maciocco
A few days after the Cutro massacre, shocking news arrives from the United Kingdom. To block the arrival of boats from the Channel, the government has decided to arrest the migrants, not to accept asylum requests (even those of those who are legally entitled to it) and to deport them to Rwanda. Things already seen in Australia.
At 4 in the morning on 26 February a wooden fishing boat loaded with migrants from Turkey crashed a few meters from the beach of Steccato di Cutro (Croton). (see post Without Rescue). The current, provisional, budget is 91 victims, including 35 minors; about eighty survived, while the search for an unknown number of missing people continues. One month after the most dramatic shipwreck of the last 10 years in Italian seas, many unanswered questions still remain.
A video published in La Stampa shows the recording of the Frontex aircraft which had sighted the vessel off the Ionian coast, at 10.30 pm on 25 February: this one, loaded with migrants, sways in a very rough sea and has no life-saving devices. The service of La Stampa also reports the weather alert from the Air Force: stormy sea with three-metre high waves in that sea area from 6 in the afternoon of 25 February to 6 in the morning of the following day. Well – despite all this, despite the fact that the Guardia di Finanza warned at 3.20 that their patrol boats could not reach their target due to the adverse sea conditions – the Coast Guard vessels do not move to start the rescue operation. Why?
And why, despite the fact that the alarm for the crash 50 meters from the shore was raised at 4 in the morning, the rescue services arrived at 5.35, with a delay of an hour and a half? Many deaths were caused not by drowning, but by hypothermia. Victims that could be saved.
While in Italy the discussion on the responsibilities of the shipwreck mounted – with the Government trying to offload them on the victims (“desperation does not justify travel that puts children at risk”, Minister Piantedosi) – in the same days the Migrant issue exploded in Great Britain with a bill presented by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, called “Stop the Boats”. Stopping boats crossing the English Channel in order to block the growing influx of migrants on the English coasts (more than 40,000 in 2022 – Figure 1).
Figure 1. Asylum seekers in the UK, by nationality (top ten). Year 2022
A shocking proposal that can be summarized in three points:
- Arrest the migrant
- Deny him the possibility to apply for asylum (even if he is fully entitled to obtain it)
- Deport him to a “third country”.
The “third country” should be RwandaAfrican country with which already a year ago the British Government (Prime Minister Boris Johnson) had established a highly criticized agreement for the transfer of migrants who had not been granted the right to asylum. Much criticized agreement – e not yet implemented – , judged unethical, wrong and racist by religious leaders, NGO representatives, public officials and members of parliament: an assessment also shared by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Amnesty International.
However, the British government now seems determined to carry out the deportation plan to the point that one of his ministers, Suella Braveman, went to Rwanda in mid-March to supervise the accommodations intended to accommodate migrants sent from the United Kingdom. A visit that was also much criticisednot only for the images of joyful satisfaction with which the mission of the Minister was represented, but also because journalists from the least friendly press were not invited to the mission Government: Guardian, Mirror and Independent.
Lo “Stop the Boats Bill” has caused a wave of indignation. “A cruel policy not very different from those applied in Germany in the 1930s, against the weakest segments of the population”; so he wrote on Twitter Gary Lineker, former English striker for Barcelona and Tottenham as well as star of the national team, today one of the best known TV commentators on the BBC. Words that provoked the ire of the Conservative party who asked the BBC the dismissal of Lineker. The former England striker was suspended from broadcasting, receiving immediately an avalanche of solidarity by the world of sports journalism and football.
The Government’s decision not to accept asylum requests obviously clashes with the 1951 Geneva Convention which defines the term “refugee” and specifies both the rights of forced migrants and the legal obligations of states to protect them.
This is why associations in defense of civil rights have arisen in the United Kingdom, including Human Rights Watch. your representative, Tirana Hassan, he said: “This is a hateful, divisive and contrary to human rights policy. I think this government is scraping the bottom of the barrel (…) The risk is that other conservative countries such as Hungary, Poland and Italy could take it as a model. We’re on a very slippery slope.”
The deportation of asylum seekers, unfortunately, has precedents.
From 2001 to today, Australia has supported a policy of deporting asylum seekers to Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and to Nauru (Figure 2), the so-called “Pacific Solution” (Peaceful in the sense of the Ocean…). Thousands of deported people, including children, were held indefinitely in precarious conditions, suffering severe abuse and inhumane treatment. A group of psychiatrists who visited the detention camps spoke of conditions similar to torture. Despite the interest of the United Nations High Commissioner (UNHCR) and Amnesty International and the numerous complaints, the model has not only been maintained over time, but also exacerbated. In December 2014, a revision of the Australian immigration law violates many references to the Geneva Convention of 1951, relating to the status of refugeesstating that the international obligation of non-refoulement is “irrelevant” with respect to an “illegitimate non-citizen”.
Figure 2.
The United Nations has repeatedly stated that the Australian system violates the convention against torture and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said indefinite detention at sea was “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” and “illegal” under international law.
The detention center on Manus Island was eventually declared illegal by the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea and ordered to be closed. Australia had to pay more than $70 million in compensation to more than 1,000 people it had illegally incarcerated on the island.
Nauru, however, persists. The 2016 “Nauru file,” a collection of leaked internal working documents written by staff, revealed repeated acts of sexual assault against children as young as six, violent assaults on detainees, and systemic neglect. (you see ‘Stop the boats’: Sunak’s anti-asylum slogan echoes Australia’s harsh policy”)
The Australian model was also the inspiration for an Israeli pattern, introduced in 2013, which forced migrants (mostly Eritreans and Sudanese) to choose whether to return to their country or move to Rwanda or Uganda; failure to depart in both cases resulted in imprisonment and those who opted to relocate were mistreated and exploited and many fled via perilous smuggling routes to Europe.
Pasqua Putignano, School of Specialization in Hygiene and Preventive Medicine, University of Florence