Montag, 8. Januar 2018

Libya: this is happening in detention centres for migrants

Asgi.itHere are the grounds given for the sentence of 10 October 2017 with which the Court of Milan has sentenced to life imprisonment a Somali citizen held responsible for the extremely serious events of violence committed in the first months of 2016 in a camp in Libya (see the statement of 11 October)



The testimony of the injured parties heard in court is appalling. People are held by force in the camp, which was managed, amongst others, by the person accused. Day by day, hundreds of people of all ages were subjected to torture, sexual abuse and demonstrative or plainly cruel murders, all of this in a climate of desperate resignation by the victims and of absolute impunity of the torturers.

It is worth taking the time to read at least a few pages of the sentence in order to realise the sheer horror in which hundreds of people are living these years in Libya’s detention centres. Such horror was recognised in the court sentence of an Italian judge.

The debate about policies to reduce the flows of migration cannot ignore this matter of fact: a politics which tries to prevent by any means the arrival of people from Libya in Italy equals condemning foreign citizens to remain in the same centres that have officially been recognised as places of torture and death.

Nobody can claim not to know.



Translation by Greta Pallaver