ROME —
Charities running migrant rescue ships in the
Mediterranean faced a pre-trial
hearing in Sicily on Saturday over alleged collusion with people traffickers
after a controversial probe that involved mass wiretapping.
اضافة اعلان
Twenty-one
suspects, including crew members of
Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the
Children, and German NGO Jugend Rettet rescue ships, are accused of “aiding and
abetting unauthorized entry into Italy” in 2016 and 2017. “Our crews rescued
over 14,000 people in distress from unseaworthy and overcrowded boats... and
are now facing 20 years in prison,” Kathrin Schmidt, who sailed with Jugend
Rettet’s ship Iuventa, said ahead of the hearing.
Trapani judge
Samuele Corso must rule whether or not to proceed to trial after a five-year
investigation mired in controversy for the mass wiretapping of charity workers,
lawyers, and journalists in what critics say is a politically motivated bid to
stop sea rescues. Italy has long been on the front line of seaborne migration
from Africa to
Europe, with a record 180,000 arrivals in 2016, dropping to
120,000 in 2017. It has registered some 17,000 arrivals so far this year,
according to the interior ministry.
Prosecutor
Brunella Sardoni told AFP she expected the preliminary hearings process to last
“several months, considering the complexity” of a case file with some 30,000
pages and hundreds of CDs. The charities are accused of coordinating their
actions with smugglers just off Libya, returning inflatable dinghies and boats
to them to be reused, and picking up people whose lives had not been in danger.
‘World’s deadliest’ crossing
The rescuers say anyone attempting the
Central Mediterranean crossing
to Europe — the “world’s deadliest” according to the UN — on rickety boats or
unseaworthy dinghies is at risk, and should be saved. At least 12,000 people
have drowned on this route since 2014. Many shipwrecks go unrecorded.
The charities
also deny ever communicating with smugglers, who are sometimes armed and can be
spotted loitering near rescues in the hope of retrieving valuable engines from
migrant boats.
Save the Children told AFP it “strongly rejects” the
accusations, as did MSF, which slammed a “period of criminalization of
humanitarian aid” it hoped would soon end.
The Iuventa was
impounded in 2017 shortly after Jugend Rettet and others refused to sign a new
and contentious interior ministry “code of conduct” accord, and as the EU
scaled up surveillance and policing in the Mediterranean. “Despite the fact
that mobile phones and computers were seized and analyzed, not a single contact
with Libyan smugglers... has been found,” said Nicola Canestrini, lawyer for
the Iuventa crew members.
Pre-trial
hearings are held behind closed doors, but representatives from the
European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and Amnesty International
have requested the judge allow them to sit in for transparency. ECCHR senior
legal advisor Allison West has condemned “improper investigative practices” in
the investigation, led by a prosecutors’ office more used to exposing Mafia
crimes.
The probe was
launched after ex-policeman Pietro Gallo, working as a security contractor on
Save the Children’s Vos Hestia ship, sent allegations against the charities in
October 2016 to Italy’s secret services, Canestrini told AFP. He and a fellow
ex-policeman also sent them to the head of the anti-immigration League party,
Matteo Salvini, before reporting their suspicions to the police. Gallo has
since said in an interview that he regrets it. Asked if he ever saw any contact
between the charities and traffickers, he replied “no, never”.
The damage was done.
Police placed an undercover agent on the Vos Hestia in May 2017, who would
provide information including elements used to charge the four Iuventa crew
members, Canestrini said. Those included alleged hand signals between the crew
and smugglers. Iuventa’s case has been studied by Forensic Architecture, an
agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, which uses advanced reconstruction
techniques to investigate police, military, and state facts. It discredited the
police theories for all three Iuventa rescues in question.
Read more Region and World
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
