„Make a difference in European politics!“ Winners of the Amnesty International Human Rights Award in 2020 are the sea rescuers of the ship „IUVENTA“

It was not only their actions that made headlines, but also the reaction of the Italian justice system.

 

By August 2017, around 200 rotating volunteer crew members had rescued more than 23,000 people from distress at sea, of whom more than 9,000 were taken on board the IUVENTA. The Italian judiciary then confiscated the ship. Aiding and abetting unauthorised entry is the criminal accusation initially levelled at 10 members of the crew – the „IUVENTA10“. They are accused of collaborating with smugglers. A guilty verdict could result in between six and twenty years in prison and a fine of EUR 15,000 for each person rescued.

 

The judiciary is now continuing the proceedings against four of the accused, while the proceedings against the six others were discontinued in March 2021. In addition to the four crew members of the IUVENTA, 17 other people and a total of three organisations (IUVENTA, Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children) and a shipping company are also on trial.

 

The story of the „IUVENTA“ project begins in 2015, the year in which it is estimated that almost 4,000 people drowned trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean. Jakob Schoen and Lena Waldhoff are studying in Berlin. They work as volunteers in a refugee centre and refuse to accept that people are being left to die in the Mediterranean: „Everyone has the right to be saved from drowning,“ Jakob Schoen tells taz newspaper. And his fellow campaigner Lena Waldhoff adds: „As young people, we want to make it clear that this is not on. We demand from Germany and the EU: do something in European politics!“

And so, on 3 October 2015, the two of them and other supporters founded the „Jugend rettet“ association. The association found support and in May 2016, an old fishing trawler was purchased and converted. It sets sail as the „IUVENTA“ in the same year. In its first year, the crew took more than 4,100 people on board and was involved in the rescue of over 3,000 others, bringing them into the sights of Italian politicians and ultimately the courts.

 

Negotiations are ongoing, but nothing has been clarified yet. The accused crew members are in Trapani almost every month for a new hearing. The gathering of evidence for the allegedly illegal actions of the sea rescuers sheds light on what states are doing to criminalise human rights activists like IUVENTA10: Crew members are monitored for months, the bridge of the ship is bugged, phone calls are tapped, undercover investigators are deployed.

 

And the results of these efforts? Scientists from the Forensic Architecture research platform at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, at the University of London have now compared the allegations made by the Italian authorities with all available nautical and meteorological data, logbooks, Frontex reports from the days of the operation as well as photos and video recordings from IUVENTA and the Reuters press agency. They consider the allegations to be false.

 

More than six years after the start of the extremely complex investigations, the highest Italian court, the Court of Cassation, decided in July 2023 to divide the lawsuits between a total of five territorially competent courts in Trapani, Castrovillari, Palermo, Ragusa and Vibo Valentia. Jurisdiction was assigned according to the harbours in which the rescued persons were brought ashore after search and rescue operations. The Court of Cassation thus stripped the Trapani public prosecutor’s office of jurisdiction over large parts of the proceedings, as it was unable to prove that the 21 defendants, three NGOs and one shipping company could be accused of a joint crime, as alleged in the indictment. The trial will be accompanied by a group of observers, including ECCHR, Amnesty International, Giuristi Democratici, Swiss Democratic Lawyers, European Democratic Lawyers and the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy & World Human Rights. A representative is sent to each hearing and reports are drawn up.

 

A constitutional complaint filed by IUVENTA lawyers on 12 May 2023 against Article 12 of the Italian Immigration Act with the Italian Constitutional Court and against the „EU Facilitators Package“ on which it is based with the European Court of Justice was rejected in all respects by the court in Trapani. The aforementioned Article 12 of the Italian Immigration Act is used as the basis for numerous lawsuits against activists and migrants and imposes severe penalties for facilitating ‚illegal entry‘. Migrants in particular have to serve prison sentences of several years in some cases on the basis of Article 12 because they are accused of being the driver or captain and thus allegedly responsible for the entry of all persons on board. Solidarity helpers and organisations are also prosecuted on this basis. Over 2,700 people have been convicted since 2013, almost all of whom are refugees themselves.

 

The activists say on their website:

 

„While we are the ones on trial, we have our own indictment to make:

We accuse European policies of actively violating the human rights of people in need. We accuse the EU of collaborating with authoritarian regimes that violate the human rights of migrants, such as Libya, Turkey and Morocco. We accuse the EU of aiding and abetting the criminalisation and detention of people on the move in defiance of its self-proclaimed ethics and principles.

 

The violence and arbitrary criminalisation by the racist border regime is the crime. Migration is not a crime!“

 

The ship is still moored in the harbour of Trapani. It was moved to a freely accessible location in 2021, where the ship was damaged and looted. The IUVENTA has since been largely destroyed. In 2022, an Italian court ruled that the ship must be restored by the port authorities to the condition it was in at the time of seizure. As the ship was in danger of sinking, it was lifted out of the water and brought ashore. However, the work on the ship is not to begin until after the judgement in the proceedings against the IUVENTA crew has been handed down, meaning that the costs will have to be borne by the defendants in the event of a conviction.

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