Amnesty International has just released a statement saying that Italy’s migrant and asylum seeker detention centres aren’t up to scratch. In April 2024, the organisation’s researchers checked out two detention centres. They found the conditions to be pretty poor and that people’s freedoms were limited. They found that people with mental health issues, LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and victims of violence were being detained.
They also concluded that the facilities they visited don’t meet international standards and are therefore illegal. The new far-right Italian government made it easier to detain migrants in 2023. They included plans for new detention centres, longer repatriation detentions and applying ‘border procedures’ to people seeking asylum from ‘safe countries’.
This means that people can be detained automatically based on their nationality, which is against international law. Amnesty International said that Italy should provide better alternatives to detention, as detention should only be used as a last resort. The centres were like prisons, with little movement, basic amenities and no privacy.
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Read Amnesty public statement here
On the cover photo, Lampedusa, Agrigento, Italy, 15 November 2022. Migrants into the immigration center hotspot of Lampedusa island on 2022 ©Alessio Tricani/Shutterstock.com
