Migrants Detained Below Deck: How Asylum Seekers Are Held in Secret Prisons on Ferry Ships to Facilitate Unlawful Returns

ROME – While vacationers sip cold beers and cocktails on the deck of a passenger ferry, it’s a very different story below decks. In the lower parts of the ship there are often people, including children, chained and locked up in dark places. This is the least known push-back practice in Europe, where secret prisons on private ships are used to illegally return asylum seekers to where they came from. It is learned from Lighthouse Reportsa non-profit organization based in the Netherlands that conducts complex cross-border investigations by combining traditional journalistic methods, such as the freedom to request information, with techniques such asopen source intelligence. “Investigative journalism – reads the website of Lighthouse Reports – helps people navigate complexity”, denouncing truths and ensuring transparency.

“Black sites”, to ban asylum seekers. The systematic denial of the right to seek asylum at EU land borders has been well documented in recent years. Last year, Lighthouse Reports and other partners revealed the existence of “black sites” – clandestine places of detention – where refugees and migrants are denied the right to seek asylum and illegally imprisoned before being pushed back. What has received less attention is the illegal denial of asylum at borders within the EU and the brutal push-backs taking place between member states – notably from Italy to Greece – at sea.

The pushbacks in Italy continue. It has therefore been discovered that asylum seekers, including many children, are held in unofficial prisons – in the form of metal boxes and dark rooms – sometimes for more than a day in the bowels of passenger ships on the Italy-Greece routes, as part of illegal push-backs by the Italian authorities. In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy had illegally deported asylum-seekers to Greece in this way, denying them the opportunity to apply for protection. Eight years later, despite the fact that the Italian authorities have repeatedly stated that this practice has not stopped, we have discovered that it continues at full speed.

The methods used. LLighthouse Reports, in collaboration with newspapers and humanitarian organizations has obtained photographs, video footage and testimonies that reveal how people who risk their lives by hiding on ferries bound for the Italian Adriatic ports of Venice, Ancona, Bari and Brindisi, hoping to seek asylum, are seen deny the opportunity to do so. Instead, they are held at the port before being locked up on the ships they arrived on and sent back to Greece. In the first visual evidence of its kind, obtained during numerous reporting trips between Italy and Greece on commercial vessels owned by the Greek ferry giant Attica Group, images were captured of the sites used to detain asylum seekers on these vessels, sometimes handcuffed, and deported illegally. It especially turned out that on one ferry, called Asterion II, people are locked up in a former bathroom with broken showers and toilets, along with two mattresses. The names and dates of the detainees are scrawled on the walls in several languages. There is visual evidence of this room, obtained with a small camera through the keyhole, that matches the descriptions given by the asylum seekers.

On Superfast I and Superfast II ships. On another commercial vessel, named Superfast I, people are held in a metal box with a caged roof in the garage room on one of the lower decks. It gets extremely hot here during the summer months. The room was visited and videos and photos shot. He matches the descriptions of the asylum seekers. There’s just a piece of cardboard on the floor. An Afghan asylum seeker says he was held in this place: “It is a room 2 meters long and 1.2 meters wide. It’s a small room […] You only have a small bottle of water and no food […] We had to stay in that little room inside the ship and accept the hardships. On a third ferry, the Superfast II, asylum seekers are kept in a room where their luggage is collected. An Afghan man managed to take a selfie while he was handcuffed to metal pipes. We went to the same spot and shot the footage, which matches the surroundings in the selfie image.

Among the detainees there are children. Three cases have been verified in which children under 18 were repatriated by ferry from Italy to Greece according to the method described above. A 17-year-old Afghan boy – his name is Baloosh – said: “They sent me back to Greece by boat, illegally. They didn’t ask me anything about my asylum application or anything else.” In addition to eyewitness accounts and visual evidence, there is confirmation from a number of crew members that these locations were being used to hold asylum seekers, who were in the process of being deported back to Greece. Furthermore, legal experts and NGOs further confirmed the findings, saying they have heard a large number of reports of these practices, which have occurred in recent years.

The plot. Under a bilateral “readmission” agreement between the Italian and Greek governments – which has been in force since 1999 although it has not been ratified by the Italian Parliament – ​​Italy is able to repatriate undocumented migrants arriving from Greece. However, this cannot be applied to asylum seekers. Asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq were also found to have been subjected to this treatment in the past 12 months. Data provided by the Greek authorities show that hundreds of people have been affected in the past two years, with 157 people returning from Italy to Greece in 2021 and 74 in 2022, although experts believe that not all cases are documented.

Violations of all rules. After the sentence of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) of 2014, Italy has repeatedly stated that this practice has ceased and pushed for the official monitoring of its border processes in the port – which had been put in place following the ECHR ruling – to be stopped on the basis of the fact that violations no longer occur. The Italian immigration lawyer Erminia Rizzi he said that these forced returns take place “often” and see asylum seekers, including minors, “prevented from accessing the territory, in violation of all the rules and with informal procedures”. Wenzel MichalskiDirector of Human Rights Watch Germany raised the question of EU complicity, saying the results showed that “Europe allowed itself to tolerate such circumstances”.