Tomorrow the first Council of Ministers after the summer break and among the measures on the agenda, the new safety decree. It is no coincidence that Matteo Salvini in these days, by means of press releases, raises the tone on the issue of migratory flows, trying to involve the majority of the government and above all Europe: "I believe a new security decree is needed in September because Italy cannot be the point of arrival for migrants from all over the world. After much talk, Europe must wake up, move, help us because the Italian borders are the borders of Europe. Lampedusa, Ventimiglia, Trieste are borders of Europe. Since Italy sends trillions of euros to Brussels every year, the defense of borders must be a European priority and to date it has not been”.
During the summer, the arrival of migrants from North Africa continued uninterruptedly, exceeding the psychological threshold of one hundred thousand units (108000 in the third ten days of August 2023). According to the regulations in force, after the first reception, the migrants are then redistributed throughout the national territory according to the criteria cited in a circular from the Interior Ministry dated 3 July last. A redistribution that, however, was not liked, in a way bipartisan, to almost all the mayors of the country who have had to invent temporary and often not dignified solutions to accommodate the new arrivals, among which the unaccompanied minors.
The Interior Ministry's guidelines for redistribution are based on the number of the resident population and on the territorial extension in the 70/30 percentage (70 for the resident population and 30 for the extension of the territory).
Net of the procedures that will be put in place, the situation is already critical today and will become unmanageable in the near future, in consideration of the Tunisian economic crisis, the turmoil in the Sahel and the unresolved Libyan instability.
The League's deputy mayor of Lampedusa gave an idea of the situation Attilio Lucia: “Lampedusa can no longer face this emergency and I am referring to Minister Piantedosi who has not yet made himself heard today. We have more than 4 immigrants inside the reception center which can only accommodate 500, we have a hospital, an emergency room which is unusable among tourists, locals and immigrants. They had promised a ship and it still doesn't exist today and they use our line, they had promised the storage of immigrant boats and even today there are more than a hundred that not even the fishermen of Lampedusa can go out to work anymore”.
Lucia's hope is that the government will take a serious position and place a ship at the disposal of the immigrants.
The new security decree
The text they are working on at the Viminale, writes Libero, will overturn the 2017 law, written by Piddina Sandra Zampa, which establishes the ban on the refoulement of unaccompanied foreign minors and regulates their reception procedures, allowing them to self-certify their age. Only in the event of well-founded doubts relating to the age declared by the minor are investigations carried out. The inevitable consequence of this rule is that all the new arrivals between the ages of eighteen and twenty have presented themselves without documents, posing as minors.
A rule, sources from the Interior Ministry say, which cannot work due to the number of entrances today. In Italy today there are 22-23 thousand unaccompanied foreign minors, for each of whom the taxpayer pays 100 euros a day. Many of those young people, due to lack of structures and personnel, are abandoned and then end up in the underworld organizations of their compatriots.
In order to protect the real minors, the government intends to implement the reversal of the burden of proof to ascertain the age of the landed person. The migrant will have to demonstrate his age with valid documents.
The Cpr, the detention centers for repatriations, will then be doubled, as provided for in the "Cutro decree" already financed in the Budget Law. The construction of the new Cpr will be in derogation from the Public Contracts Code.
The Cprs, as well as for repatriation, will also serve as a place of imprisonment for violent foreigners, before sending them home. The government, in fact, intends to speed up the practices involving dangerous subjects with an established criminal profile, closing them directly in the CPR and thus preventing them from being held on the national territory. The penalties for those who attack the police will also be increased.
For repatriations, the bilateral agreements between countries apply. The one with Tunisia is active, the one with Egypt needs to be perfected and the one with the Ivory Coast is still being defined.
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