Illegal CPRs, the liberation of hostages has begun

Without a law that regulates the methods of administrative detention , “the right to personal freedom can only expand again,” wrote the Court of Appeal of Cagliari, accepting the request for immediate release of a thirty-year-old Albanian. Migrants locked up in repatriation centers – the illegal but not clandestine Italian cages – must be freed immediately because their detention is illegal. An administrative measure cannot keep people in jail, so locking someone up in CPRs is an abuse. The opening of that cell was the first concrete effect of Friday’s ruling (number 96) of the Constitutional Court on CPRs, a ruling triggered by the request to the Constitutional Court made by a justice of the peace.

The Court of Appeal of Cagliari explicitly states that the Court has made "considerations that cannot be eluded by the judge called to decide on the validation of detention and the relative extensions " on the unconstitutionality of the detention of human beings in repatriation centers. The considerations of the Court of Appeal of Cagliari do not only concern the specific case of the freed Albanian. He had been locked up since March in the CPR of Macomer, the one where the police entered last week beating migrants who were protesting because they had been asking for medical assistance in vain for days. The one where a boy, Hassan, with his leg in a cast, had to swallow batteries and a razor blade to be taken to the hospital ( we wrote about it on July 2 in 'Unità ). The one where - as in all Italian CPRs (and in normal prisons things aren't much better) - very heavy and blatantly illegal sedations with powerful psychotropic drugs are systematically carried out. Massive doses of Rivotril, usually.

The activist network Mai più lager, no ai Cpr denounces for the umpteenth time "the lack of control by civil society, which is systematically prevented from accessing, despite the documented conditions of detention that tell of degradation, alienation, abandonment and widespread sedation, alternating with the violence of beatings and punitive transfers, as a method of managing internal order against those who claim rights". It recalls that "the centers are the responsibility of the prefectures", the incredible choices in the identification of private managers made with the sole criterion of convenience and often in the presence of evidently fabricated documentation. Teresa Florio , one of the activists in defense of the people locked up in the CPR, says: "You only have to look at the Milan trial to understand what is happening, a trial born from our reports and videos from two years ago in which they ended up talking only about the regularity of the selection of the manager ". The Mai più lager network recommends: "While waiting for the government to prepare yet another decree law on which to place confidence to try to patch this macroscopic flaw, the lawyers of the prisoners after the ruling of the Consulta are promoting urgent appeals for the immediate release of their clients. On our social networks we have shared the format of the LCS Studio of Milan, already adopted by various lawyers".

Activists, however, point out a major risk: " Unfortunately, we would have hoped for a more radical decision that would lead more decisively to the abolition of the CPRs. Instead, the legislation recommended to the 'legislator' (this legislator...) does not bode well, indeed it foresees the advent of a dangerous formal screen, a simulacrum of legality, to make even more opaque and endorse what cannot but remain, in fact, an institution dedicated to the institutional torture of migrants. Something is changing, however, albeit hypocritically, following the CPR issue in Albania , which has had the sole merit of being able to draw public attention to the fact that administrative detention has also been implemented in our country, for several decades and therefore certainly not by the Meloni-Piantedosi government: awareness is spreading" .

FROM

Angela Nocioni