Pushbacks: Government’s “informal readmission” practice is illegal, 2021 ruling establishes

ROME – The “readmissions at the border”. They call them that, but they are real rejections, and as such they violate national law and European standards: their illegitimacy was established by a sentence of the Court of Rome in January 2021, following an appeal by the lawyers Anna Brambilla and Caterina Bove ofImmigration Legal Studies Association (ASGI). The judges also recognized the illegitimacy of the bilateral readmission agreement between Italy and Slovenia, dating back to 1996 but never ratified by Parliament, which has been used several times since 2018 to reject migrants. Today the government is ready to start over with “readmissions”, focusing on security and the difficulty of managing entries into the so-called northern Lampedusa, or in that area of ​​the country between Monfalcone, Gorizia and Udine. The data collected by the institutions speak of an increase in flows of 204 percent, or about four thousand people more than the thousand last year.

History. The ASGI appeal that led to this ruling stems from a report by Border Violence Monitoring Network, with an emblematic story. In the summer of 2020 a young Pakistani was found by the carabinieri in Trieste without documents. Having escaped from his country of origin because his sexual orientation would have put his life in danger, the boy had expressly said that he wanted to apply for asylum in Italy. But the police arrested him, confiscated his mobile phone and forced him, together with others, to sign documents written in Italian without translation. Then they loaded him into a van and took him near the border with Slovenia. From there, after a kilometer of walking, the young man was arrested again by the Slovenian police.

The order of the Court of Rome. Even in Slovenia, the boy expressed his willingness to apply for asylum, but after a night spent in a room without food, without water and without toilets and after being subjected to violence by the police – reads the order of the court of Rome – it was loaded onto another truck and taken to the Croatian border. Arrived here he was arrested once again and “beaten by the police with batons wrapped in barbed wire”, writes the judge Silvia Albano, then again loaded onto a van and transferred to the border with Bosnia. He was taken to the Lipa refugee camp, but as there was no place for him, he was abandoned in the countryside. From there he reached Sarajevo, where he still lives today in a decaying building.

The opinion of the network experts Turn to the Balkans. “The news that the government wants to resume informal readmissions at the border worries us first of all from a human point of view, because we know what abuses people face during chain pushbacks. And then from a legal point of view, because the readmissions have already been judged illegitimate, given that they violate national law and European standards”, explained the lawyer Caterina Bove during a press conference. The rejections are also contrary to article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, adds the lawyer Anna Brambilla, of ASGI. The ECHR prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment and therefore cannot be rejected because there is no guarantee that migrants in third countries are treated with respect and dignity. In addition, underlines Gianfranco Schiavone of ICS Trieste, rejections prevent people from applying for asylum.

Even those who ask for international protection are rejected. Yet we are talking about a fundamental right, guaranteed by article 10 of the Constitution as well as by European and international legislation on protection. Only after the request can it be decided whether this should be presented in another country, as also stipulated by the Dublin III Regulation. In 2020, the Italian government considered it could proceed with readmission agreements even with respect to applicants for international protection. And on this point not only the court of Rome but the Draghi government itself has expressed its opinion, which, responding to a parliamentary question by Riccardo Magi, of Più Europa, had specified that readmissions cannot in any way be applied to asylum seekers.