LONDON – Ryanair’s ground assistant, while discussing with the Italian citizen, does not want to hear reasons: “I have to see a second proof of your identity for you to board the flight” to the United Kingdom. “But why? Is the Italian passport not enough?” Protests Lara Parizotto, 26, born and raised in Brazil, naturalized Italian thanks to her grandmother. Lara works in London for “The 3 million”, the association that defends European citizens across the Channel after Brexit.
The dialogue continues. In the video shot by Parizotto, at the gate of Barcelona airport waiting to board, the Ryanair assistant makes it clear that Lara could risk not leaving if, in addition to her passport, she “will not show a second identity document”. Yet Parizotto is a regular resident of Edinburgh, she has every right to enter the United Kingdom only with the biometric passport associated with her British residence permit, and even European tourists have the same right. “But often the Italian passports are false”, explains the Ryanair representative, “and we have the same problem with the Greek and French ones … For this we do preventive” random “checks. “But no law requires me to show you a second document,” Parizotto emphasizes. She replies: “Then I’ll call the supervisor. Madam, you want to travel, don’t you?”.
This is not the only case. Another representative of “The 3 million”, the 29-year-old Romanian and European citizen Andreea Dumitrache, resident overseas for 10 years, tells Repubblica that she received the same request the other day before boarding an Easyjet flight, another low cost one. , from Palma de Mallorca to Bristol. With one aggravating circumstance: her ground assistant even asked her for physical proof that she is a legal resident in the UK. Document that the Johnson government has always rejected because “at risk of forgery” and so you are electronically associated only with your passport.
There’s more. Just do a search on Twitter to understand that such cases have been occurring for some time in Europeans, especially for flights from Europe to the United Kingdom. “It recently happened in Portugal, France, Romania, Denmark”, explains Andreea, “a Romanian citizen from Switzerland was denied boarding for the United Kingdom”. With what right can an airline deny boarding to an Italian or European citizen with all documents in order to Great Britain?
There are those who argue that this is another consequence of Brexit. But the Home Office tells Repubblica that it has never asked Ryanair and Easyjet for anything like this: “It is a matter that exclusively concerns the airlines, not the government,” explains a spokesman for the British Interior Ministry. Ryanair and Easyjet did not answer our questions until the evening. The Italian embassy and consulate in London are “following the story”, but for now they do not see discrimination.
“The problem is that airlines”, a European diplomat tells us, “have more and more power over this, and this was also seen during the pandemic, when they denied boarding to many passengers”. Even in that case, the underlying reason seems to be the same: the companies, already weakened by Covid, are fined if a passenger is rejected at the border, and in that case they must also repatriate him at their own expense. Therefore, they can decide to put a preventive and arbitrary filter on boarding, which even overrides the laws of governments.
“But this is also the symptom of an environment in general that is increasingly hostile towards European immigrants after Brexit,” says Parizotto. “In any case”, the diplomat continues, “the relentlessness of the companies towards the passports of Italy and other countries very exposed to migratory flows smacks of discrimination”.
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