MSF Ends Activities in Pozzallo Reception Center

Press Release MSF - Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) will end its medical activities in a reception center for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Pozzallo, Sicily, and in other reception centers in Italy's Ragusa Province, due to unacceptable conditions including overcrowding and a lack of protection for vulnerable people, the organization said today.

The business of bad welcoming in Messina

Antonio Mazzeo – Messina, city of bad welcoming. Hundreds of refugees are half-hidden in the tent city of PalaNebiolo, the former baseball pitch at Conca d'Oro-Annunziata, owned by the Messina University. Forty degrees in the shade in summer, the cold touches zero in winter. When it rains, however, it's still worse: without any drainage, the ground is covered in water and the reception centre is submerged in puddles. In the former barracks of 'Gasparro' in Bisconte, in the building generously declared to be habitable, more than 200 people are packed tightly, within 550m2 of space, the bunk beds touching each other and with an endless queue for meals and showers. A shameful building, truly disgusting, a shame and disgrace for the state institutions and local administration which does not seem able to look or listen, and which chooses, as always, not to speak.

The bodies at the bottom of the ocean are not part of the market

The latest shameful episode in Europe's immigration system concerns the treatment of those who have lost their lives at sea. According to Salvi, the public prosecutor, the 900 bodies from recent tragedies will not be recuperated from the sea due to the high costs of such an operation. The problem has instead been passed on to the government, which, with its standard hypocrisy, has stated, "everything that can be done will be done in order to try and recuperate the bodies of our brothers and sisters," ( Renzi, Prime Minister). First we kill them and then we let them rot at the bottom of the sea, erasing all traces of any wrongdoing, convinced that any memories of innocent lives will also disappear from our consciousness.