Migrations, the great deal of detention centers for repatriation: a system that appeals to private individuals and doesn’t care about people’s rights

ROME – A total of 56 million euros are expected, in the period 2021-2023, from the tenders to entrust the management of Detention Centers for Repatriation (CPR) to private entities. Costs from which those relating to the maintenance of structures and police personnel are excluded. Figures that make administrative detention a very profitable chain which, not surprisingly, has attracted the economic interests of large multinationals and cooperatives in recent years. The privatization of management is, in fact, one of the most controversial aspects of this form of detention without a crime and marks a further exceptional feature: allowing someone to profit from that deprivation of personal liberty. The detention centers for repatriation (Cpr) are the structures in which migrants are held in detention conditions, in order to be repatriated. The increase is particularly evident for the year 2024 (+14.39 million euros, or 46.18 million instead of the 31.79 of the 2022 forecast).

Who made the history of administrative detention. To illustrate this situation is the Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties and Rights (CILD), which in Rome presented a new report on the subject, entitled “The CPR affair. Profit on the skin of migrant people”, within which great attention was paid to the multinationals Gepsa and ORS, to the company Engel srl and to the Edeco-Ekene and Badia Grande Cooperatives which have contributed, in recent years, to making the history of administrative detention in Italy. A far from noble history made up of systematic violations of the rights of detainees, with the possibility for the managing bodies to maximize – illegitimately – their profits also due to the total absence of controls by the public authorities.

The complaint about the conditions of detention. In fact, the Report gives ample space to the denunciation of the conditions of detention which risk appearing as inhuman and degrading and to the structural denial of the fundamental rights of the detainees. The right to health, defense and freedom of correspondence are not, in fact, protected within the CPR: brutal places that allow private individuals to speculate on the skin of inmates, thanks also to the total absence of supervision by the public.

A black hole for the exercise of rights. “These centers have always been – declared Arturo Salerni, president of CILD – represented a black hole for the exercise of rights by detained persons. They also represent a black hole in terms of the methods and amount of expenditure, charged to the Treasury, in the face of serious deficiencies in management and the conditions in which the subjects who fall into the traps of administrative detention find themselves living, or the deprivation of liberty in the absence of any hypothetical crime.

An ideological approach without analysis of the phenomenon. The government’s intention to increase their number is the result of choices dictated by an entirely ideological approach that has no basis in analyzing the phenomenon. The experience of the last 25 years, regardless of the public or private management of the centres, tells us that we need to look at alternative and non-coercive ways of dealing with the issue of irregular presences on the national territory, that people need to be accompanied on regularization and of emersion, erasing the opprobrium of detention without a crime”.