The Criminalization of Migrant Boat Drivers in Italy in 2024
From Sea to Prison project – Annual report 2024
1. The numbers: more than 100 people arrested in 2024
Throughout 2024, as in previous years, we systematically monitored news of arrests of migrants accused of facilitating “irregular immigration”, particularly after arriving by sea. We supplemented this data with additional information gathered from our network of lawyers, who informed us of a dozen cases not reported by the local news. Based on these sources, we counted 106 arrests. Most of these arrests took place immediately after disembarkation, while some occurred at a later moment. In all but two cases, we also have information about the nationality of the arrestees.
Graphic: Nationalities of arrested boat drivers, 2024
(Source: Arci Porco Rosso and borderline-europe, project “From the sea to prison”)
Left: Middle East (10%) Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey
Others (10%)
Central Eurasia (12%) Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan
Right: Egypt (35%)
East Africa (17%) Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea
Tunisia (16%)
% of 106 arrests
Much like in previous years, in 2024 Italy criminalized Egyptian migrants more than any other nationality. At least 37 Egyptian nationals were arrested, over one third of the total. The second most criminalized nationality group was Tunisian. Based on the official data on the number of arrivals, approximately 1 in every 100 Egyptians arriving to Italy by sea was criminalized, while for Tunisians the number was 1 in every 200. In general, 1 person in every 600 people arriving by sea was arrested, a slightly higher rate than in 2023 (where we counted 1 arrest for every 800 arrivals).
The ports with the highest number of arrests were Syracuse and Pozzallo in Eastern Sicily, along with Roccella Ionicaand Crotone in Calabria. Very few arrests were reported in Lampedusa, while recent arrivals in the Apulia region (as the route has re-opened) led to several arrests in the city of Leuca. Arrests that occurred in Ravenna, Ancona, Napoli and Salerno reflect the repressive policies advanced by the Piantedosi Decree’, which assigns NGO ships operating in the Central Mediterranean with ports very far away from the point of rescue.
About three quarters of all arrests occurred on the Central Mediterranean route (so against people departing from North Africa), whereas the rest affected people departing from Turkey, although only 5% of people undertaking the sea crossing came through this route. This shows that the number of arrests on the Ionian route is proportionally much higher.
Continuing a trend that began in 2022, 17% of the arrested people are from East African states (such as Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia and Eritrea), while 12% of affected people are from Central Eurasia. These include Ukranian and Russian citizens, as well as Kazak and Uzbek nationals. 10% of arrested people were coming from the Middle East(Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan). We have no knowledge of arrests affecting people traveling from West Africa, which shows that the situation has significantly changed in comparison to a decade ago. To our knowledge, all the people arrested in 2024 were men.
Graphic: Locations of arrests of boat drivers , 2024
The ports of Syracuse and Pozzallo recorded the most arrests in Sicily, while the ports of RoccellaIonica and Crotonerecorded the most arrests in Calabria.
Few arrests were reported in Lampedusa, while recent arrivals in Puglia (after a long interruption of crossings on this route) saw several arrests in Leuca.
The arrests in Ravenna, Ancona, Naples and Salerno reflect the repressive measures of the “Piantedosi Decree”, which assigns NGO ships to very distant ports outside the central Mediterranean.
About three quarters of the arrests concerned people arriving via the Central Mediterranean route (i.e. from North Africa), while the remaining people reached the coasts by boats from Turkey, although only 5% of migrants arrived via this route. This shows that the number of arrests on the Ionian route was proportionally much higher.
We would like to thank the Roma 3 Legal Clinic, Maldusa and ASGI Bari for sharing information on some of the cases they are supporting.
2. Our Casework
We are currently monitoring and supporting the cases of 128 people criminalized for facilitation of irregular migration after the sea crossing. Of these, 86 are currently detained in prisons across Italy. Almost half (41) of the prisoners with whom we are in touch, are citizens of North African countries (Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, Moroccan), while about one third (28) are from Asian countries (including Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia).
Slightly more than half of the prisoners we are in touch with are incarcerated in Sicily (42 people), mainly in the provinces of Agrigento and Palermo. About one third (28 people) are in Calabria, while one fifth (18 people) are detained in prisons across Italy, particularly in Apulia and Campania.
The remaining forty of the people we are in touch with are currently free, for various reasons: either because pre-trial detention was suspended, and the accused was allowed to attend trial while living outside prison, or because they were acquitted – or becausethey have already spent years in prison, served their sentencea, and are now trying to re-build their lives in Europe. Some of them have returned to their countries of nationality, one voluntarily, and the others through deportation.
3. Just like in a movie: Italy continues to try minors
This year, we followed several cases of the criminalization of minors as boat drivers, in which the question of verifying the accused’s age has become central to the criminal proceedings.
Only one of these trials has unfolded in auvenile Court, that of Ahmed, an Egyptian 17-year-old who was arrested in July 2023 and on trial in Palermo, accused of Art. 12bis (the new crime introduced by the Meloni government). The other two young men are being tried as adults.
In 2024, we were reminded once again that age verification plays a key role in the institutional persecution of people on the move, and especially in their criminalization. Two young men – one from Senegal arrested in 2016, the other from Guinea Conakry and arrested in 2023, when he was just 16 – were both sentenced at the ordinary Court of Trapani and at the Appeal Court of Palermo respectively, both courts for prosecuting adults. Despite having declared they were minors, and having provided official documentation demonstrating their age, the Italian justice system still classified them as adults, and put them on trial as such. One of them, the young Guinean man, who is now 17, is still today in a prison for adults.
The critically-acclaimed movie, Io Capitano, shows the journey of a brave teenager who had to take on the responsibility of transporting other people across the maritime border. Today we know that the Italian justice system would not only have arrested the film’s protagonist, and sentenced him to years in prison – but it would not even have recognized his rights as a minor.
4. Article 12bis
This year has seen the first trials based on Article 12bis, introduced by the ‘Cutro Decree’. The new crime drastically increases minimum penalties for facilitation of irregular border crossings if a death or serious injury has occurred during the journey.
The first people to be charged under this new offense were seven people who arrived in Calabria just one month after the decree was approved. In the beginning of 2025, after almost 2 years of pre-trial detention, the court issued a verdict in the first instance, deciding to not apply Article 12bis, acquitting five of the seven defendants, and sentencing the remaining two under Art. 12, for the ‘simple’ form of facilitation. This positive outcome follows another ruling, issued by the Court of Reggio Calabria in July 2024, in which the prosecutor had asked for two men arrested in 2023 to be sentenced under the new article. Here too, the court dismissed the attempt to apply the new offense, acquitting one of the two defendants and sentencing the other for the ‘simple’ form instead.
In this context, we are now waiting for the decision in a third pending case, the last one we know of and are monitoring. In this case, the accused include one Egyptian adult, facing trial at the Ordinary Court of Agrigento, and Ahmed, the minor we mentioned in the previous section, standing trial at the Juvenile Court in Palermo. We were relieved to learn that the court suspended pre-trial detention for Ahmed last month, authorizing his release to a housing facility. However, in the same hearing the court confirmed the indictment, and Ahmed’s trial will continue. His co-defendant’s verdict is expected inMarch 2025.
We emphasize that Article 12bis even more than Article. 12, represents an outrage, targeting survivors of shipwrecks and maritime disasters, while completely disregarding the institutional responsibility forthese tragedies.
5. The Cutro Disaster
In 2024 the court issued a verdict in the first instance of the trial against the five people arrested following the maritime disaster at Cutro, in February 2023. The sentences ranged from 11 years in prison for Khalid Arslan, from Pakistan, to 16 years for Sami Fuat and Hasab Hussain, from Turkey and Pakistan respectively, all the way up to 20 years for Mohamed Abdessalem, from Syria, and Ufuk Gun, from Turkey. The man who was identified as the actual driver of the boat, Bayram Guler, died in the shipwreck. It is important to note the severity of these sentences, especially given that the punishment relates to facilitating irregular immigration along with death as an undesired consequence of facilitation. The harshest sentence, of 20 years behind bars, was issued after a fast-track trial, which entails an automatic reduction of the final sentence by a third, in this case by 10 years. We have only ever seen similar sentences (i.e. of 30 years) in cases where the charges included murder with intent.
In a year that saw the first attempts to apply the new crime of “Article 12 bis” of the Immigration Act – introduced by the ‘Cutro Decree’ last year and establishing minimum sentencing of 20 years in prison – it’s significant that trials following the Cutro disaster, even while based on facts prior to the introduction of the new crime, represent the only real instance in which such a terrifying sentence was actually applied. The sentencing of Ufuk Gun and Mohamed Abdessalem to 20 years in prison after a fast-track trial means that they were to all effects sentenced according to the punishments laid down by the Cutro Decree, despite having been judged according to the previous version of the Immigration Act.
These sentences can only be understood as an exemplary punishment for a shipwreck that – unlike so many others – took place directly on Italy’s shores, due to its sudden and shocking visibility, became a target for political instrumentalization from the current government.
6. Freedom for the Libyan Footballers!
2024 was a fundamental year for the s.c. ‘Libyan Footballers’ case, eight young men arrested in 2015, when they were only 18 or 19 years old, after the sad and infamous tragedy known as the ‘Ferragosto Massacre’, and who were sentenced to between 20 and 30 years in prison.
In October 2024, the Cassation Court rejected an appeal against the decision made by the Appeals Court in Messina. The latter had ruled the defense’s request for a re-trial to be inadmissible. The request for a re-trial had offered new potentially exonerating evidence, obtained through important investigative efforts by the defense. It is clear that the accused were sentenced after a summary trial, even though the Italian justice system refuses to recognize this and provide them with the protections that should be guaranteed by law.
Five of the young men unjustly sentenced as scapegoats for the disaster are from Libya – including Alla Farah, whose moving interview was broadcast on Italian public television last month. Unfortunately, the negotiations between Italy and Libya for their return home – a request around which their families have organized demonstrations and petitions – seems to have run ashore. Unlike the suspected war criminal Osama Al-Masry, it seems that they don’t have friends high-up enough in the government who can make a phone call and organise a private jet. In the meantime, Alla and his seven co-defendants have already spent a third of their lives in prison.
7. Maysoon Majidi and Marjan Jamali are free! (But their co-defendants remain in prison)
Over the year, the trials against Maysoon Majidi and Marjan Jamali developed, two Iranian women arrested at the end of 2023 for facilitating the entrance of two different vessels from Turkey, along with their respective co-defendants, Ufuk Akturk and Babai Amir. These two cases – especially that of Maysoon, a feminist activist and filmmaker in Iran – attracted important expressions of solidarity across Italy, and a collective debate and challenge around the crime of facilitation. A first result in their cases was when the courts accepted the request for their release from prison. On February 6th, Maysoon was finally acquitted. Her co-defendant, Ufuk Akturk, however, was sentenced to 8 years and 4 months in prison, simply for having driven a boat of people on the move to safety on the Calabrian coast. The trial against Jamali and Amir is still ongoing at the time of writing, and the court decision is awaited at the end of the month of February. Amir, like Ufuk, remains in prison: in the letters he has written to us, he expresses being both very concerned for his own trial, and also his solidarity with those struggling for this cause.
Though we know that in the current moment it’s not possible, everyone who is criminalized for facilitating freedom of movement should receive the same solidarity that Maysoon received. Among them are the three Palestinians from Gaza, imprisoned in 2023 and sentenced to 4 years and 8 months of detention by the Court in Catania in December 2024. In collaboration with their lawyers, they are currently preparing to appeal the decision.
8. The Struggle Continues: In the sea, in the prisons, in the courts
The year 2024 was a stage for important and highly mediatized trials, from the Iuventa case to the trial against the former Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini. These trials brought sea rescue and Article 12 to center-stage, albeit in very different ways.
In the 7-year-long trial accusing the crews of the civil sea rescue ships Iuventa, Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders of Article 12, in April the Judge for the preliminary hearings in Trapani decided to not send the accused to a full trial. The decision confirmed that there were no relevant criminal facts, underscoring the full and effective right to rescue. After years of campaigning for freedom of movement, the court confirmed the principle that migrants at sea are first and foremost asylum seekers and rescued from shipwrecks and situations of distress.
Unfortunately just when it seemed that some fundamental rights were being recognised by the courts, a very different acquittal had a diametrically opposite significance. In December 2024 the Court of Palermo exonerated Matteo Salviniof the charge of kidnapping (holding people against their will) and refusing official acts, on the basis that – again – there were no relevant criminal facts. For the court, blocking the landing of 57 migrants who had survived a shipwreck, and forcing them to stay on a ship anchored at Lampedusa for days on end, is an entirely legitimate conduct.
If this decision cast a shadow over the rights of people on the move, there are nevertheless several fronts that remain open.
Among these, the Kinsa Case is fundamental, taking Article 12 to the threshold of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which must now evaluate the law’s compatibility with the fundamental rights established by the Treaty of Nice. We await the next hearing, hopefully in April this year, in the hope that the court will take a firm stance against this piece of legislation that we have criticized for so long.
In Ragusa, on the other hand, the trial against Mediterranea continues, which once more sees an NGO forced to prove in a court of justice that saving lives at sea is not a crime.
Finally, in March the trial will begin in Crotone against the authorities who blocked the rescue of over a hundred people drowned near Cutro in 2023. This will be an opportunity to demonstrate in court that those truly responsible for deaths at sea aren’t to be looked for among migrants, but in the state bodies that continue to prioritise border policies over human rights.
So we're heading into 2025 ready for the struggles ahead, aware of the challenges but strengthened by a solid network—one that can resist, respond, and build together. As a comrade wrote from prison many years ago: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
From Sea to Prison
From Sea to Prison is an activist project by Arci Porco Rosso and borderline-europe that monitors Italy’s criminalization of ‘boat drivers’ since 2021, and offers socio-legal support to arrestees. We would like to thank the Guerilla Foundation, the Fund for Global Human Rights, Sea-Watch, the Safe Passage Fund and United4Rescue for deciding to support this cause and our activism.
Finally, many thanks to Valeria Ferraro for the photo above (the Cutro trial, Crotone 2024).
