Frontex

“What this government wants to do is to go and look for smugglers all over the globe,” declared the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, in the press conference of Cutro, a few days after the shipwreck that led to the death of 92 people.The so-called smugglers seem to have become the heart of the government's line on immigration, with a new decree which further tightens the penalties for those who drive a boat carrying migrants.The persecution of smugglers is not a new strategy:in the last decade it has been a cornerstone of Italian and European migration policies.What has it meant so far? Is this really the solution to stopping departures and deaths at sea?And who really are the smugglers? “We cannot fail to see that it is a very hot political issue and that there is a strong demand, just read the newspapers, for the punishment of the highest possible number of smugglers on the face of the earth", explains to Blue suitcase Gigi Omar Modica, magistrate who has been dealing with irregular im...

A few days after the closed-door press conference which saw Ursula Von Leyen, Giorgia Meloni and the president of Tunisia Kaïs Saïed together, yet another piece of news arrives from the Mediterranean of a terrible shipwreck, which occurred on the night between the 13th and 14th June.off Pylos, Greece. There are 78 confirmed victims so far.However, there is talk of hundreds of missing people which could raise the death toll to 600, according to the latest estimates.Among the survivors, some reported that in the hold of the boat there were "at least 100 children”.Overall there were around 750 people present, coming from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Palestine. While operations at sea continue, for the umpteenth time a pattern of denied or rebuffed responsibilities is repeated, which we had recently seen with the Cutro shipwreck, and which we are seeing now with the continuous changes of version of the Greek authorities, the conflicting versions.The Frontex agency has for...

When 94 people, including 35 children, drowned 40 meters from the Steccato di Cutro beach last February 26, the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, said:“If we could, we would have saved the migrants.”And he had blocked the requests for transparency on the opaque chain of rescue and resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, for his words of rare inhumanity immediately after the tragedy and for the rescue intervention after the shipwreck had already occurred. The errors, flaws and falsehoods of the government's version of the Cutro massacre The government did not deliberately cause the migrants to die, Meloni responded to these requests while the blame and buck-passing between the Coast Guard (which reports to the Ministry of Transport) and the Financial Police (which reports to the Ministry of the Interior) continued. and Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency).Among those who claimed that they had been consulted only for information and that the...

Almost ten years have passed since around 600 people lost their lives in two shipwrecks, on 3 and 11 October 2013 off the coast of Lampedusa.In the 11th attack, at least 60 minors lost their lives, so much so that it was defined as "the massacre of children".Since 2016, the Day of Remembrance and Reception has been established on 3 October, as a warning that such tragedies should not be repeated. Since 2014, almost over 26,000 people have disappeared in the same way in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach European shores, according to the data provided by the Missing Migrants project of the World Organization for Migration (IOM). via Missing Migrants Project The last massacre took place at dawn on February 26th:dozens of bodies were dragged by the waves of the stormy sea onto the beach of Steccato di Cutro, in Calabria, after the shipwreck of a fishing boat leaving from Izmir, Turkey, with over 200 people on board. Over 60 people have died of this latest shipwreck at t...

The recent ones resignation of the executive director of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, represent only the last piece of a mosaic of complaints, journalistic investigations And investigations on the work of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, accused of very serious violations of human rights. The step back of the 54-year-old French politician, head of the agency since 2015, would have been due to contents of a report confidential of the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF).The investigation, reportedly from an internal Frontex source, “identifies precise responsibilities of the agency and Leggeri for some rejections that occurred in Greece” and indicates “a direct link between the meeting in which the disciplinary measures were to be decided and Leggeri's resignation”. The Director General of OLAF, Ville Itälä, commenting on the investigation with some MEPs, he would have defined Leggeri as "disloyal towards the EU” and responsible for a “poor staff management”. European sources prese...