Migrants, the report of the Migrantes Foundation: The European Union, Italy and the great differences in treatment of those who flee

ROME – There is and there has been – fortunately – temporary protection in the European Union for almost 4.5 million Ukrainians, but for the other refugees, coming from other migratory routes, push-backs continue along all the European borders. And we go back to pushing back at the Italian-Slovenian border,”Northern Lampedusa” as Minister Luca Ciriani defines it, to try to justify a serious violation of human rights. In short, different migrants – reads the RemoAgainst, the open site on the facts of the world coordinated by Ennio Remondino – different forms of piety, depending on the color of the skin? It would seem so. “In solidarity with the Ukrainians, but always rejecting and discriminating against all other refugees in violation of human rights and international conventions – he underlines to come, the newspaper of the Italian bishops – is the great contradiction that weighs on Italy and Europe that have traveled on two tracks in terms of reception in the most dramatic year of the century”.

Italy-Slovenia and the Balkan route. And only two years have passed since the Court of Rome, January 2021, declared the readmissions from Italy to Slovenia illegitimate because they were based on an agreement signed in 1996 and never ratified by Parliament, violating domestic, European and international laws, as well as exposing people to “inhuman and degrading treatment in the Balkan countries and torture in Croatia”.

Disparities in the right to asylum. ‘Right of asylum’, the report of the Migrant Foundation about refugees photograph 2022 in our house. And he tells us that in June just under 296,000 people with international protection lived in Italy (Ukrainian refugees included), about five refugees for every thousand inhabitants. A far cry from the decidedly higher reception figures of France (613,000) and Germany (2,235,000), despite Italy being the land of first landing on the Mediterranean.

Hospitality without losing well-being. The report underlines that “Europe has been able to welcome millions of refugees without losing a decimal in well-being and security”. The EU has in fact registered over 4,400,000 Ukrainians for temporary protection until the beginning of October (171,000 in Italy, where the generous ‘self-welcoming’ of the Ukrainian community has operated by saving the government from many problems in collaboration with many Italian citizens).

Asylum applications, more than half rejected. As for other asylum applications, the first half of ’22 already saw 365,000 applicants, against 201,000 in the same period of ’21. Paths slowly. Only 38% of the applications examined for the first time in 2021 (202,200 out of 523,200) and only 33% of the appeals presented were successful. Italy slow and severe: in 2021 only 51,931 asylum applications reached a ‘sentence’, and of these 58% had a negative outcome.

Europe that welcomes or rejects, at its convenience. Simultaneously – complaint migrants – the States of the Union “have done everything to keep out of their borders, directly or by proxy, tens of thousands of migrants and refugees as much in need of protection (if not even more fragile) than the Ukrainian ones”.

Mediterranean extermination. Towards the end of October 2022, the (minimum) estimate of dead and missing refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean is just under 1,800 human beings. Once again, the heaviest toll is paid by those attempting to cross the central Mediterranean, on the route that leads to Italy and Malta, where 1,295 dead and missing have been counted.

The infernal Balkan route explodes again. The last few years have also seen a marked increase in the crossings of the EU’s external borders from the Western Balkans: from 5,900 in 2018 to 106,400 in the first nine months of this 2022. With the return of forcing and actual illegalities denounced at the beginning, Thyestes and Ljubljana.