Italy’s Court of Cassation, the country’s highest judicial authority, has ruled that handing over refugees and migrants rescued in the Central Mediterranean to the Libyan coast guard is a crime because the north African country is not a safe port.
Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that the decision makes final the conviction of the captain of the Italian private vessel Asso 28, which on 30 July 2018 rescued 101 people in the central Mediterranean and then handed them over to the Libyan coastguard to be returned to Libya.
The supreme court judges ruled that facilitating the interception of migrants and refugees by the Libyan coastguard falls under the crime of “abandonment in a state of danger of minors or incapacitated people and arbitrary disembarkation and abandonment of people”, effectively establishing that the 2018 episode amounted to collective refoulement to a country not deemed safe in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Migrants and refugees returned to Libya after being intercepted at sea are routinely detained and subjected to torture, maltreatment and abuse, according to multiple reports by international non-governmental organizations.
La Repubblica claims that the court’s decision could “call into question the validity of the Italy-Libya agreements.”
There has been multiple incidents of Italian authorizes detaining humanitarian ships that would have refused to obey the instructions of the Libyan Coast Guard by rescuing the migrants on their own and bringing them to Italy.