Crotone – The administrative detention order to which the Humanity 1 ship of the German NGO SOS Humanity was subjected last March has been definitively cancelled. This was established by the sentence of the judge of the Civil Court of Crotone Antonio Albenzio, who dissolved the reservation on the memory presented by the NGO after having suspended the provision issued by the Italian authorities. The Humanity 1 had been subjected to administrative detention in Crotone where it had arrived after having rescued 77 migrants adrift on various small boats in the Strait of Sicily. Humanity 1 was accused of having hindered the rescue efforts by the Libyan military who, in turn, had fired shots at rescuers, based on emails sent to the Italian authorities by the Libyan coast guard. and migrants. In the ruling the judge states that despite the memorandum for the management of migratory flows signed between Italy and Libya in 2017, “at present it is not possible to consider Libya a safe place under the Hamburg Convention, as the Libyan context is characterized by violations serious and systematic human rights issues and the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees has never been ratified by Libya”.
The judge also cites the findings of the UN High Commissioner which “on several occasions highlighted the failure to respect the fundamental rights of the person during the recovery operations carried out by the Libyan coast guard”. For the judge, all these elements “are sufficient to exclude the existence of any qualification of the operations carried out by the Libyan coast guard, with armed personnel and without identification of a safe place compliant with international parameters, as rescue operations, in the sense recognized by multiple international sources”. “The logical corollary – writes Albenzio – is that no obstructive conduct can be found towards the NGO involved” which on the contrary “was the only vessel to intervene to fulfill, in the sense recognized by international sources, the duty of rescue at sea of migrants”. The judge, annulling the arrest, accepted the appeal of SOS Humanity and condemned the Ministry of Infrastructure, the Ministry of the Interior and the Police Headquarters of Crotone, the Ministry of Finance, the Naval Operational Section of Crotone, represented by the Catanzaro State Attorney’s Office, to reimburse the NGO the sum of 14 thousand euros for litigation costs.
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