Peoples' Court To Be Held in Palermo. The Accusation: Crimes Against Migrants By the Italian Government and the EU

Press release - We understand that the Minister of the Interior, Marco Minniti, has been invited to a celebration in Palermo organised by the newspaper La Repubblica, in order to discuss migration and reception. This all while a vast number of men, women and children are tortured and left to die in Libyan prisons, left to down in the Mediterranean or finally reach Italian shores but without life in their bodies.

In Flight from Libya: Who are the “presumed smugglers” really?

Debate with Nancy Porsia, journalist

This is the second event in the international project “Controversies in European migration politics – providing protection vs. border security” (KideM). 

The European Community and Italy have made agreements with Libya for years. Already in 2009, Berlusconi and Gaddafi, the former leader of the Libyan regime, signed an agreement which promised the payment of millions of Euros in compensation for Italian colonialism, while asking at the same time, nevertheless, that Libya halt the “flow of migrants”.

In 2011, during the so-called “Arab Spring”, Gaddafi's regime fell and, along with it, also the wall set up to stop the flow of migrants. Today, despite the fact that there is still no Libyan state, the EU is attempting to establish agreements in order to stop those migrants who are leaving from the African coastlines.

A land of barriers

The European Ministry of the Interior met yesterday in Luxembourg in order to discuss the new politics of immigration in the wake of the proposals from the European Commission and in view of the summit to be held in Brussels at the end of the month. According to initial reports, the meeting ended with a new push towards the creation of the famous 'hotspots' for identification, categorization and, so it seems, ever easier methods of repatriation for incoming migrants. Everything is taking place in the heated context of days thick with declarations and proposals from the world of institutional politics, a world which frequently employs a mystifying language totally devoid of any historical dimension in which one could raise the grave situation faced by so many migrants gathering in various frontier zones.