The extreme right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni has raised its policies on migrants under the banner of inhumanity.
Starting with the shame of the state of emergency, which will allow the president of the Italian Government to issue ministerial orders without debating them in the Council of Ministers, much less in Parliament.
Orders that, before being improbably challenged by migrants before the administrative courts, may very well violate constitutional rights and principles.
It is an act of pure demagogy, solely aimed at displaying the ferocity of the Government before the right-wing electorate, to satisfy their xenophobic instincts.
More information
The migratory journey of Pedro Sánchez
In addition to the state of emergency, the policies of the Meloni Government are expressed in two other orders of provisions.
The first is a decree-law of February 23, 2023, aimed at sabotaging as much as possible the rescue operations of migrants at sea.
This normative text conditions the qualification of the boats of non-governmental organizations to save people who are shipwrecked to various and senseless bureaucratic requirements;
it introduces absurd obstacles to the so-called "multiple salvages", authorizing each ship to carry out a single salvage before docking in the ports, and provides, for the violation of these prescriptions, administrative sanctions of 10,000 to 50,000 euros, immobilization for two months and, in case of recidivism, the confiscation of the ship used.
The second provision is a measure as senseless as it is cruel.
It consists of the abolition of the so-called special protection that until today had allowed the reception, integration and, in many cases, access to employment to thousands of immigrants without political asylum and in conditions of serious hardship and vulnerability.
Depriving these people of this kind of protection is equivalent to making them irregular and clandestine and, consequently, driving them into illegality, handing them over to the control of the mafias, accentuating inequalities and oppressions and, at the same time, hatred towards our society and our institutions.
There is no doubt that, in all these aspects, the policy of the Meloni Government expresses and satisfies the latent racism in its electorate.
Constrained by the economic crisis to abandon the anti-European projects proclaimed in the electoral campaign, this government flaunts its authoritarian and para-fascist identity by mercilessly targeting the weakest: abolishing or, at least, reducing the modest citizenship income introduced by the previous Government of Conte, who had saved millions of people from starvation and absolute poverty, and, above all, exhibiting indifference and contempt for migrants, all seen as potential enemies.
In these policies against migrants, a perverse and paradoxical inversion of the forms of populism itself in terms of security is manifested.
The old penal populism was based on the fear of street crime, that is, of oversized phenomena, although certainly illegal, in order to generate fear and obtain consensus for useless and demagogic measures, although legally legitimate, such as the exasperation of penalties. .
On the contrary, the new xenophobic populism is based on incitement to hatred, defamation and the criminalization of behaviors, not only lawful, but morally virtuous, such as saving human lives at sea or spontaneous forms of reception by part of ordinary citizens, all with the aim of fueling fears and racism and obtaining social approval of measures that are themselves illegal,
Frontex agents, the Civil Guard and other police forces during the presentation of the Minerva-Frontex operation on June 17.
Antonio Sempere (Europa Press / Getty Images)
Such a criminalization of virtue and solidarity is producing, in addition to deaths at sea, extremely serious damage to the social foundations and ideals of our democracy, which is the massive bankruptcy of moral sense.
When inhumanity, immorality and indifference to suffering and death at sea are practiced and displayed by institutions, they are not only legitimized, but also seconded and nurtured.
They become contagious and normalize.
Without this corruption of the moral sense operated through the exhibition of immorality at the vertices of the State, the massive consensus that fascism and Nazism enjoyed, and that autocrats like Trump and Bolsonaro have enjoyed and enjoy in their countries, would not be understood. , Orban and Erdogan.
These cruel policies have poisoned and perverted our societies.
They have sown fear and hatred towards those who are different.
They have discredited the elementary practice of helping someone whose life is in danger and, with it, the normal feelings of humanity that constitute the fundamental assumption of democracy.
In short, they are fascismizing common sense and rebuilding the ideological foundations of racism.
On the other hand, the xenophobic policies against migrants, beyond the para-fascist propaganda used in their support by the Italian Government, are substantially shared, in different forms and measures, by all European countries, united by a cruel war against migrants. .
The European Union was born against racism and nationalism, against genocide and concentration camps, walls, barbed wire, oppression and racial discrimination.
Today this identity is bankrupt along with the "never again" proclaimed 70 years ago against the horrors of the past.
Across Europe a strident contradiction is taking place between the constitutional principles of freedom and equality that inform our democracies and our exclusionary policies that are the blatant denial of such principles.
Do not forget that the same right to emigrate is a fundamental right in force, established by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 and by article 35 of the Italian Constitution.
It is also the oldest of human rights, having been formulated in the 16th century by Francisco de Vitoria in support of the conquest of the "new world" and later claimed by John Locke, who placed it on the basis of the right to survival. guaranteed to all —he wrote— by the possibility of emigrating “into the wild lands of America”, since there is “enough land in the world to supply twice its inhabitants”.
From then on, the right to emigrate became a fundamental rule of customary international law in support of colonization.
Then it was the Europeans who could exercise it, to invade and depredate the rest of the planet, thanks also to the right to promote war against anyone who opposed its legitimate exercise.
Something that was carried out with the destruction of pre-Columbian civilizations and the massacre of tens of millions of indigenous people.
Today, when the asymmetry has been reversed, and it is no longer Europeans who exercise the right to emigrate, but those who flee countries impoverished by our predatory policies, this right has become a crime and is repressed with the same harshness with which it was brandished at the origins of the modern age for purposes of conquest, robbery and colonization.
thanks also to the right to promote war against anyone who opposed its legitimate exercise.
Something that was carried out with the destruction of pre-Columbian civilizations and the massacre of tens of millions of indigenous people.
Today, when the asymmetry has been reversed, and it is no longer Europeans who exercise the right to emigrate, but those who flee countries impoverished by our predatory policies, this right has become a crime and is repressed with the same harshness with which it was brandished at the origins of the modern age for purposes of conquest, robbery and colonization.
thanks also to the right to promote war against anyone who opposed its legitimate exercise.
Something that was carried out with the destruction of pre-Columbian civilizations and the massacre of tens of millions of indigenous people.
Today, when the asymmetry has been reversed, and it is no longer Europeans who exercise the right to emigrate, but those who flee countries impoverished by our predatory policies, this right has become a crime and is repressed with the same harshness with which it was brandished at the origins of the modern age for purposes of conquest, robbery and colonization.
A monument to the migrants who have died at the European borders located on the beach of Scheveningen, The Hague, on June 20.
Romy Arroyo Fernandez (NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Hence the need to denounce this contradiction between our policies against migrants and our own tradition.
Because, in the matter of migrants, the democratic identity is at stake not only of Italy, but also of Europe and of all the rich countries of the West;
because these inhumane policies call into question, along with the right to life and dignity of the shipwrecked, also the dignity and democratic credibility of our countries and of all of Europe.
Indeed, because the laws and practices against migrants are responsible for the silent massacre produced by the rejections at the borders and by the landing bans.
There are many thousands of victims whose only fault is to have been born in countries that were previously pillaged by our colonizations and later by our globalization.
their dead,
their discriminations, their oppressions are the denial of all our proclaimed values.
And as long as they continue to occur, they will weigh on our consciences like an intolerable shame.
A rational and anti-racist policy should start, realistically, from the evidence that migratory flows are structural and irreversible phenomena, the result of the current savage globalization that neither laws nor walls nor border police can stop, but only force clandestinity and dramatize, condemning migrants to repression, marginalization and exploitation.
A rational policy would even have to accept the migratory phenomenon as a beneficial remedy for the demographic decline of rich countries, where there are fewer and fewer young people and always more old people.
For this reason, it should do exactly the opposite of what almost all the political forces do today, not only in Italy: instead of riding and feeding racism and fear,
A group of migrants held by the Libyan authorities await their deportation on May 12 in Surman, west of Tripoli.
MAHMUD TURKIA (AFP/Getty Images)
Obviously, the perspective of overcoming borders and an effective universalization of fundamental rights may seem like a utopia today.
However, it must be recognized that the history of civility is also a history of utopias (good or bad) realized, while, on the contrary, borders, walls and barbed wire are only fragile and useless signs of our insecurity, with which we have the illusion of stopping an unstoppable phenomenon and protecting our privileged living conditions, separating ourselves from the rest of the world and avoiding facing the causes of massive emigration, largely caused by our own policies.
At present, the least realistic hypothesis is that inequalities and poverty can continue to grow without limit, and that our rich democracies can in the long run continue basing their unscrupulous standards of living on the hunger and misery of the rest of the world.
All of this is unbelievable.
Although unrealistic in the short term, the project of an international constitutionalism based on the equality of all human beings, already normatively established in the various international bills of rights, represents, in the long term, the only realistic alternative to the future of wars, destructions ecological, fundamentalism, racism, inter-ethnic conflicts, terrorist attacks and the growth of hunger and misery to which its failure would give rise.
Luigi Ferrajoli
(Florence, 82 years old) is emeritus professor of Theory and Philosophy of Law.
The last book of his published by him is
For a Constitution of the Earth.
Humanity at the crossroads
(Trotta, 2022).
Translation by Perfecto Andrés Ibáñez.
Subscribe here
to the weekly newsletter of Ideas.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber
