How rescuing drowning migrants became a crime | Refugees | The Guardian: As the Iuventa entered the harbour of Lampedusa, the crew expected to be questioned briefly by police, as they had been on previous occasions, then allowed to get back to work. They were wrong. Within a few hours, their ship would be seized, marking the beginning of a long and still unresolved criminal investigation that leaves 10 humanitarian volunteers facing up to 20 years in prison.
In the small hours of 2 August, while a crowd of journalists assembled on the quayside filmed and took photographs, detectives specialising in organised crime searched the Iuventa. The following morning, before the crew were even fully informed of the case against them, details were splashed across the Italian media. This “German extremist NGO”, as one newspaper later put it, was suspected of aiding illegal immigration – a crime in Italian law – by collaborating with Libyan smugglers. News outlets quoted liberally from a case file that showed the Iuventa had been under surveillance for months: there were even transcripts from a recording device placed on the ship’s bridge. Police photographs, labelled and distributed to news agencies, purported to show several occasions on which the ship’s crew had received migrants directly from boats driven by smugglers themselves.
“We don’t have anything to hide, and we are looking forward to returning to the search and rescue zone one day, to fight for human rights,” declared a member of the crew, who gave her name as Katrin, in a video statement released to the media. But these were explosive allegations, at a time when migration had become such a toxic issue that Italy’s interior minister declared he “feared for the democratic integrity of the country”. Italy’s populist opposition parties led the charge against rescuers, accusing them of being taxi del mare, a “sea taxi” service for migrants, while the government was pressuring NGOs to limit their operations. In the spring of 2017, two other NGOs had been investigated – but this was the first time a ship had been seized. Within months, under the looming threat of prosecution, NGOs were all but forced out of the Mediterranean.
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Today, the Iuventa remains impounded, and 10 of its crew members are still waiting to find out if they will face trial. They deny ever working with smugglers, and have assembled documentary evidence that they say proves their innocence. More disturbingly, investigative journalists in Italy and elsewhere have unearthed evidence which appears to show that the surveillance began not with the Italian state, but with a spying plot involving a private security agency and the far-right political leader Matteo Salvini.
The case is not yet over, but it has already marked a turning point: in just a few years, Europe has gone from saving lives at sea to attacking the people who do it. And it all began with the moment, in the words of the Italian author and migration specialist Annalisa Camilli, that “humanitarians were transformed from angels at sea into dangerous collaborators with smugglers”.
In the small hours of 2 August, while a crowd of journalists assembled on the quayside filmed and took photographs, detectives specialising in organised crime searched the Iuventa. The following morning, before the crew were even fully informed of the case against them, details were splashed across the Italian media. This “German extremist NGO”, as one newspaper later put it, was suspected of aiding illegal immigration – a crime in Italian law – by collaborating with Libyan smugglers. News outlets quoted liberally from a case file that showed the Iuventa had been under surveillance for months: there were even transcripts from a recording device placed on the ship’s bridge. Police photographs, labelled and distributed to news agencies, purported to show several occasions on which the ship’s crew had received migrants directly from boats driven by smugglers themselves.
“We don’t have anything to hide, and we are looking forward to returning to the search and rescue zone one day, to fight for human rights,” declared a member of the crew, who gave her name as Katrin, in a video statement released to the media. But these were explosive allegations, at a time when migration had become such a toxic issue that Italy’s interior minister declared he “feared for the democratic integrity of the country”. Italy’s populist opposition parties led the charge against rescuers, accusing them of being taxi del mare, a “sea taxi” service for migrants, while the government was pressuring NGOs to limit their operations. In the spring of 2017, two other NGOs had been investigated – but this was the first time a ship had been seized. Within months, under the looming threat of prosecution, NGOs were all but forced out of the Mediterranean.
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Today, the Iuventa remains impounded, and 10 of its crew members are still waiting to find out if they will face trial. They deny ever working with smugglers, and have assembled documentary evidence that they say proves their innocence. More disturbingly, investigative journalists in Italy and elsewhere have unearthed evidence which appears to show that the surveillance began not with the Italian state, but with a spying plot involving a private security agency and the far-right political leader Matteo Salvini.
The case is not yet over, but it has already marked a turning point: in just a few years, Europe has gone from saving lives at sea to attacking the people who do it. And it all began with the moment, in the words of the Italian author and migration specialist Annalisa Camilli, that “humanitarians were transformed from angels at sea into dangerous collaborators with smugglers”.