On Tuesday it was officially announced that the CPSA
at Pozzallo has been transformed into a Hotspot, the third in Sicily. Inside,
the Italian police will be supported by officials from Frontex, EASO and
EUROPOL, while the management of the services is still being left to the
cooperative Azione Sociale, as the a winner of the three-year contract, the
tendering competition of which has been open for some months, has yet to
chosen. The Hotspots are the result of European political decisions made in the
remit of the relocation agreements, and are presented as a definitive
arrangement for differentiating between economic migrants and asylum seekers.
This is a practice which has alarmed monitoring
organisations, who over the past few months have denounced the arbitrary
distinctions made by the police between who receives the right to protection
and who does not, based exclusively on nationality, leading to hundreds of
collective rejections, beyond every guarantee of human rights. The strong
concern expressed by various non-governmental organisations regarding the
discriminating practices recently adopted in diverse parts of Sicily, including
the CPSA at Pozzallo, has led tot he Ministry of the Interior, on January 8,
adopting a circular distributed to prefects and police chiefs on the
“Guarantees and methods of access to asylum procedures”. The circular
reiterates the subject's right to request protection, and the guarantees of
information, legal protection and translation which belong to every asylum
seeker. While the new circular states that “to not be able to present a demand
for international protection constitutes a clear violation of law”, this does
not explain how, only a few days ago – January 14 and 15, to be precise –
dozens of migrants in the province of Agrigento were provided with notices of
deferred rejection, without having had the minimal guarantee of protection, nor
made aware of what would happen to them consequentially.
Yesterday afternoon Pozzallo's first disembarking of
2016 took place, with 280 migrants brought to the dock by the navy ship
'Spica'. Many of the refugees were of Pakistani, Moroccan and Tunisian
nationalities, among whom were some women, all attended to by an increased
number of police and functionaries from Frontex, EASO and EUROPOL. The first
aid operations were undertaken by the Red Cross and the Protezione Civile (the
local police force), while health screening was left to ASP doctors. There were
also various representative present from the UNHCR, IOM, Save the Children and
Terres des Hommes, who followed the disembarking operations so as to then
undertake their own work in the new Hotspot, where
we hope that they act according to their mandate. We
know, in fact, that at Augusta, for example, at the point of disembarking the
IOM is allowed to undertake their own activities of providing information only
after the identification operations, when the migrants have already been
screened for the notices mentioned above, which frequently manifests in
hundreds of deferred rejections. This confirms the claims of those who find
themselves on the street, trying to understand why they have been abandoned by
the Italian state.
The stages of the operations are extremely slow; the
gathering of information by law forces and the functionaries of the agencies
present began as oon as the boat reached the port, followed by the minutiae of
the search procedures – manual and with a metal detector – to which every
migrant is subjected before being allowed to get on a bus headed for the
centre. The form of control is justified via recourse to the protection of
public security, but carried out with the energy of someone who has already
made an assumption of criminality, certainly not in the presence of citizens with
equal rights and dignity, many of whom, as we know, are fleeing from situations
of conflict, undertaking a terrible journey. But one knows that frequently it
is not the concrete facts but prejudices which govern common thinking. Thus
each person who arrives from the sea finds themselves with the long task of
having to defend and claim their dignity.
The migrants who landed yesterday were all temporarily
transferred to the new Hotspot, and we do not know how this will shape their
future. The hope is that the protection of rights and freedoms of each person
does not remain an exception by daily practice, as our own laws are meant to
guarantee.
During that day news arrived of another 968 people,
including one body, recovered from the sea.
Lucia Borghi
Borderline Sicilia Onlus
Translation: Richard Braude
Translation: Richard Braude
