News
ansa
ansa

New report reveals cause of death in Italian expulsion centers

Latest update : 2017/06/20
By ANSA Latest update : 2017/06/20

An investigative report carried out by attorneys, sociologists, researchers, photographers and activists called "Morti di CIE" or dead from CIE, looks into the deaths reported from 1998 until today at Italian identification and expulsion centers. Migrants have died from a range of causes including heart attack, pharamceutical overdose and suicide at centers across the country: from Turin to Rome.

''This report is the outcome of two years of research'', Silvia Minguzzi, among the project's authors, told ANSA. ''We wanted to carry out work on the people who died at expulsion centers, starting from judicial acts, looking for them in prosecution offices, to give back dignity to these people and see how the State dealt with these cases, whether probes were opened,'' he said. The first registered death in the report dates back to the summer of 1998, the last was recorded in February 2015 at a CIE in Bari. ''We are talking about 20 cases'', she stressed, adding however that, ''the problem isn't the number of deaths, because even one death is too much. Until there are centers there will be deaths''. Deaths are sudden, Minguzzi also noted, ''sometimes similar. They are strange and when you put them together, something isn't working''.


Victims include people who ''shouldn't have been incarcerated, who couldn't be expelled yet were there'', like Mohamed Ben Said, a 39-year-old Tunisian who died at the expulsion center of Ponte Galeria near Rome in 1999. He was married to an Italian woman but his marriage certificate was only found a day after he died. ''If there is no push from the community, very often people who are alone remain inside these centers, which are difficult to access for associations''. 

A search for dignity 

The report includes a glossary on the different types of centers in Italy and a history on Italian administrative detention laws with photos and charts. ''The report's idea isn't to blame someone but to register facts and data'', although often ''these were not passed on by State attorneys' offices'.' For researchers ''even discovering that the name of someone who has died was different is important to give an identity to these people who aren't numbers''. According to the group, ''expulsion centers should be shut down, we don't see their usefulness and, looking at the numbers, expulsions too are scarce''. In the future, ''we would like to continue with the project by implementing an observatory on what is occurring in the Mediterranean, also connecting it with contexts outside Italy.

(ANSAmed).