The alarm of civil society organizations: Italy’s push-back practices at the border with Slovenia violate the Zampa law on the protection of unaccompanied minors.
While once more dramatic immages and testimonies arrive from migrants and refugees, among which unaccompanied minors and families with children, abbandoned in the snow in desperate conditions on the Eastern borders of the European Union. Amnesty International Italia, Asgi, Centro Astalli, CeSPI, CNCA, Italian Council for Refugees – CIR, Defense for Children International Italia, Emergency, INTERSOS, Oxfam Italia, Salesiani per il Sociale, Save the Children Italy, SOS Children’s Villages and Terre des Hommes intend to publicly draw attention to the risks for minors at the border between Italy and Slovenia.
According to official data released in September 2020, Italy quadrupled the readmissions from Italy to Slovenia over the past year, on the basis of the bilateral agreement of 1996, reaching 962 from January to the end of September 2020, compared to 250 in the same period of the previous year. The trend appears to be confirmed by the data released recently by networks and civil society organizations, which report 1,240 rejections between January 1 and November 15, 2020*.
As part of the implementation of this agrement between the two countries, recently defined “illegitimate in many respects” by the Ordinary Court of Rome, and due to a series of chain rejections that sends migrants and asylum sekers back to Bosnia and Herzegovina, opening them to risk of violence and abuse, the worrisome non-application of the protections provided for by Law 47 of 2017, the Zampa Law also emerges.
In fact, the organizations are alarmed by two directives on age assessment sent on 31 August and 21 December 2020 by the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Trieste Juvenile Court to the border police. In contrast to the guarantees enshrined in the Zampa Law and the Protocol on the determination of age approved by the State-Regions Conference in July 2020, these Directives generally authorize the police to consider migrants intercepted at the Italy-Slovenia border as adults who declare themselves minors, with respect to whom the police themselves have no doubts about adulthood, without the judicial review required by law.
This mandate actually assigns the Public Security authority a discretionary power regarding the attribution of age to migrants and refugees subjected to border controls. In so doing, this clearly is in contrast to the provisions of the Zampa Law that provides that age verification be controlled via documents and a socio-health examination, through a multidisciplinary procedure under the jurisdiction of the Juvenile Judicial Authority.
It is important to remember that illegal readmissions from Italy to Slovenia are only the first step in a chain of rejections that brings migrants and refugees back from Italy to Bosnia, through violence and continuous violations of their rights. European parliamentarians Bartolo, Benifei, Majorino, Moretti and Smeriglio, have recently engaged on a mission between Italy, Croatia and Bosnia, to personally monitor the situation of migrants in those areas. The practice adopted in Trieste risks endorsing practices that conflict with the prohibition of pushback of unaccompanied foreign minors envisaged by Art. 19 of the Consolidated Immigration Act, as amended by the Zampa Law.
Recent journalistic inquiries have reported the presence of several unaccompanied minors in Bosnia who declared that they had been readmitted from Italy to Slovenia. It is likely that they were identified as adults by the Italian border police, according to the directives of the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office, without any age assessment procedure being initiated. For this reason, Amnesty International Italia, Asgi, Centro Astalli, CeSPI, CNCA, Italian Council for Refugees – CIR, Defense for Children International Italia, Emergency, INTERSOS, Oxfam Italia, Salesiani per il Sociale, Save the Children Italia, SOS Villaggi dei Bambini and Terre des Hommes hope that the Ministry of the Interior, the Prosecutor’s Office at the Juvenile Court of Trieste, and the other competent authorities will take all the necessary measures to ensure that:
- All illegal readmissions at the Italian-Slovenian border of asylum seekers and migrants icluding minors definitively stop;
- That the norms provided by the Zampa Law on protection of unaccompanied minors, with particular reference to age verification and push-back prohibition are thoroughly applied.
* Aimed at the Balkans, The Balkan route. Migrants without rights in the heart of Europe, January 2021. This document reports data emerging from a request for generalized civic access by Altreconomia.