«Multiple regulatory, humanitarian and constitutional critical issues regarding rescue at sea». Those are heavy words pronounced yesterday by the Agrigento prosecutor Giovanni Di Leo. Words that opened an unprecedented clash with the Ministry of the Interior. The case starts from the eleven bodies recovered by Geo Barents on Friday, or rather: from their landing on land. The Ministry of the Interior indicated the port of Genoa to the Doctors Without Borders ship, where there are also 165 shipwrecked people saved in three interventions, but told them to transfer the lifeless bodies onto a patrol boat of the Lampedusa coast guard for transfer to ‘island.
IN THIS WAY jurisdiction over the facts, even if they occurred in international waters, should be with the prosecutor’s office of Agrigento, competent over the largest of the Pelagians. The fact that the ship was sent to Liguria, however, complicates things both in terms of the competence of the magistrates and the conduct of the investigations. «Any investigation into the case should await the arrival in the port of Genoa of all the informed people (crew, rescued people, etc.) and obviously be carried out with delegation to that judicial authority or the police force», states Di Leo. Who explains that if his colleagues in Genoa believed they were competent, they could “carry out urgent checks on the bodies landed in Lampedusa” only after “several days from their transfer to shore and probable burial”.
In short, the Interior Ministry’s decision to disembark the dead and the living in two distant ports, instead of everyone in Porto Empedocle for example, risks creating serious problems. The prosecutor concludes his note with a harsh attack on ministerial decisions: «The application of the criminal law, the investigations envisaged by the procedural code as mandatory, the very determination of jurisdiction and criminal competence itself cannot, according to the Constitution, be left to to discretionary decisions of the political-administrative authority, but only to the law itself”. A clear stop to political discretion in cases like this.
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LESS THAN TWO HOURS PASS and comes the reply from the Interior Ministry, as if banging its fists on the table: «The identification of place of safety (safe place of disembarkation, ed) constitutes the prerogative of the Ministry of the Interior and therefore, reviewable, as such, only by the administrative jurisdiction”. In this regard, the ruling of the Lazio Regional Administrative Court is recalled, on an appeal by MSF relating to two old landings in Ancona and La Spezia, which reiterated this jurisdiction because «rescue operations must be framed in the broader and more complex context of the migratory phenomenon by sea”. Competence, however, is different from agency. We will see what the Council of State decides, which should soon pronounce the second instance decision. Before doing so, he asked the Bar to communicate the free reception places in the regions of the two landings and in the South, given that the official reason for the distant ports is a better distribution of migrants on the national territory. An objective which, however, is only valid in the case of NGO relief efforts.
Mayor Filippo Mannino raised further criticism of the transfer of the bodies to Lampedusa, where almost 600 people have arrived in recent days. «On the island there is a small mortuary. We have recently installed two cold rooms which will only be tested next week. We are not ready to house 11 bodies. Other logics prevailed”, he says piqued, he who has always had a helpful attitude with the Meloni government. In any case he welcomed the coffins with the tricolor sash. They will be hosted in the marine protected area headquarters. In 24-48 hours they should be transferred to Porto Empedocle by regular ferry.
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MEANWHILE GEO BARENTS sail north. The arrival in Genoa is scheduled for Tuesday. “I thought all afternoon in Gaza, about how horrible it must be not to be able to manage the bodies of the dead, of which there are tens of thousands,” Fulvia Conte says from on board. She is an expert rescuer, she coordinates rescue operations and it is not the first time that she has found herself zipping up bags intended for lifeless people. “But I had never seen anything like it, I don’t think it has happened to any NGO,” she says.
According to medical staff, the bodies had been floating for at least a week, maybe two. They were swollen with water and therefore very heavy. The skin was pale. Some were naked, others with clothes. Sometimes it was possible to recognize the sex, other times not. One woman looked pregnant, her belly was bigger than the others. While an MSF dinghy collected the bodies, many kilometers away, another found itself carrying out a rescue: 19 migrants were spotted from the bridge asking for help. «On the one hand life, on the other death. A few tens of meters away”, says Conte.
YESTERDAY, THEN, THE OCEAN VIKING he saved 64 shipwrecked people and recovered another body. Yet one was spotted by SeaBird aircraft. They are two different bodies, just as those identified by the aircraft and those recovered by Geo Barents on Friday were partly different, despite the total number coinciding: eleven. Combining information and positions, there are at least sixteen corpses. It is not known if there are others. Nor whether it was a phantom shipwreck or a massacre with survivors, perhaps brought into detention by the same Libyans who refused to search for the bodies on Friday.
