"Find me a culprit!": how the Italian police sent two Turkish men to prison without any proof
by Carmen Baffi
On June 6th this year, in Crotone - a city on the Ionian sea in Italy's South-West region of Calabria - two young Turkish citizens were sentenced to 12 years in prison and a fine of nearly two million Euros, for having transported 69 migrants on a small sailing boat. Everything happened less than a month before the sentence, on the evening of May 13th, when the two young men were immediately identified as the apparent captains of the boat, arrested and sent to jail. Kercek Abdulkadir an Sakik Mehmet are 23 and 24 years old - just twice that of the years they will have to spend in prison.
More than anything else, the trial demonstrated the inhumanity of the affair. With the assistance of a translator provided by the court, one of the migrants testified that much of the boat's crew left Afghanistan for Iran and then Turkey, where they stayed for around nine months before embarking for Italian shores. Their contexts for organizing the journey came from other migrants who had already entered Europe: call a number and you get all the information you need to arrive. The journey coast 10,000 Euros, paid through money transfers to one Iranian account or another. Responding to the state prosecutor, one of the witnesses explained that while waiting to leave Turkey, he lived in a room with seven other migrant but that only he was taken at 4.30am one morning, and put in a taxi for the beach. There he found a small boat which took groups of four people at a time to a 15-meter-long sail boat.
The vessel was designed to hold up to seven people, but was filled with ten times that. According to the witness's account, the people who took them on board the boat disappeared immediately afterwards. "They closed us in there and then left, we departed four hours later." Before the departure, someone identified simply as "Big man" came down into the hold, took everyone's phones and put them in a bag in another room, threatening them that if they touched the phone they would be arrested by the Italian authorities.
During the crossing, the migrants were divided up into three rooms: one big, one medium, one small. For the first three days of the journey, the migrants were forbidden from moving between rooms or even leaving them. They were only allowed to go to the toilet or smoke a cigarette on the last day. They could communicate between the rooms below deck, but they were not allowed out to prevent the boat from capsizing. Scared of death, they remained still and dehydrated for three days. Only on the final day were they allowed above deck on two occasions, for those feeling ill.
Once he was above the deck, the witness said that he saw another two refugees beneath deck, but no one was at the helm because the boat was in auto-pilot. He then sated that the two men on trial were lodged in the first room below deck and that it was only on the final day that he saw them above deck, smoking. Finally, he said that he had never seen the accused drive the boat, and that if it seemed that he had said so during his previous statements made to the police on the evening of the landing, this was surely due to something being lost in translation.
And this is where doubts arise. Twelve years in prison for smoking a cigarette? The prosecutors explained nevertheless that they were sure the two men on trial were the boat drivers due to a whole set of proofs - including observation of the sail boat by the Italian Coast Guard, utilizing optometrics that allowed them to see at night and at 3km distance. The marshal of the naval section of the Customs Police in Crotone explained that when they boarded they boat, they saw with their own eyes the people behind the wheel. When they came near, they claim they managed to pick them out while the accused tried to mix in with the other migrants, and that they falsely claimed to be from Iran when in fact they only spoke Turkish.
Both of the men accused provided the same version of the facts: they lied about their nationality "because someone told us: when you get to Italy, don't say you're Turks, because they'll send you back." The Customs naval commander explained how they question the migrants at the landing - people already shocked by the journey - to understand who had more freedom on board during the crossing. This, for him, is the detail that allows them to identify the drivers of each boat. For him nationality is also a give-away: one Turk among thirty Iranians, for example, means that he is sure to be the driver. And this apparently was enough to put two young men behind bars.
Criminalized
Immigration, and migrant landings on our coastlines in particular, are yet again becoming an important argument in electoral campaigning [the then-imminent national Italian elections, ndr.], with the full weight of approximations, manipulations and falsifications that we have seen before, and which have never helped to resolve such a complex, decade-old situation. More than 1,400 people have arrived along the Crotone coastline over the last fifteen days alone. One of the hottest issues in the past - which now seems to find an important place next to the policy of 'closing the ports' - is the campaign against people smugglers - which means an iron fist against boat drivers. According to news published by the police in Crotone, at least 40 such boat drivers have been arrested since the beginning of this year.
On the basis of Article 12 of the Immigration Act, anyone identified as the person who drove a boat headed for Italy with migrants on board is immediately accused of aiding and abetting unauthorized immigration, a crime established by the Italian law in order to discourage, punish and repress entrance that violates the norms regulating migration into Italy - protecting state borders. The penalty established by so-called "simple aiding" is a prison sentence between 1 and 5 years, and a fine of 15,000 Euros for each person whose entrance was facilitated. This already harsh law is made even bitterer by the various aggravating factors included in commas 1 and 3. In fact, if more than five people are assisted, if they have run any risks or been subjected to inhumane treatment, if the crime is committed with three or more people, or with the aid of fake documents, or if the accused possesses weapons, then the sentence can rise to between 5 and 15 years imprisonment.
The law establishes a further increase in the years of imprisonment if there are several aggravating factors simultaneously. This punishes not only those who promote, organize or finance people smuggling, but also people who materially transport migrants without entrance visas - and in general anyone who facilitates unauthorized entrance of foreign citizens into Italy or another European country. This is why smugglers and migrants who driver boats - even if they are forced to do so by a third party - are put on the same level, without distinction.
Another issue around the criminalization of boat drivers is that of international protection, governed by the Geneva Convention of 1951, which also establishes when someone can be excluded from recognition as a refugee. The EU absorbed the Convention's rules in the directive 2004/83/CE, made effective in Italy in 2007 through decree-law n. 251. This lays down that sentences for particularly serious crimes have the effect of excluding the possibility of being recognized as a refugee (or subsidiary protection) because the foreign citizen represents "a threat to public order and security". In 2009 the Italian 'Security Package' law, proposed by the Northern League politician Roberto Maroni, inserted the 'aggravated' form of Article 12 of the Immigration Act into this list.
In 2018, the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, decided to include all forms of the crime, approved in his 'Security Decree'. This means that an asylum seeker found guilty of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, for having driven the boat they arrived on, will be significantly blocked during their request for international protection. In March 2022, the Italian High Court declared one part of Article 12 (comma 3, letter D) to be unconstitutional - the aggravating factor of using fake documents to facilitate entrance.
The tragedy of the sentences imposed on those accused of 'boat driving' is explained in the report 'From Sea to Prison', an investigation led by Arci Porco rosso and Alarm Phone with the collaboration of Borderline Sicilia and borderline-europe, published in October 2021. The report gathers data on the number of arrests made in Italy over recent years,* which demonstrate a process of criminalization. The report also shows what these sentences mean for those in prison. The one thousand cases analyzed include sentences of between two and twenty years imprisonment: twenty people with sentences of more than ten years, and seven people with life sentencing. In 2018 and 2019, the report states from the first pages, the police arrested one person for every hundred migrants arriving. There have been 2,559 arrests between 2013 and 2021.
"From a review of nearly one thousand cases, we estimate that over a third of the arrestees are from North Africa, 20% from Eastern Europe and 20% from West Africa. Many of the West and North African citizens arrested and imprisoned in Italy were forced to drive boats from Libya, a country they were fleeing from. In the case of the Eastern European boat drivers, many recount that they were tricked into people smuggling." Foreign prisoners represent 32.5% of the prison population in Italy, which is also the country with the highest number of prisoners per cell among the major European countries.
A Necessary Culprit
"Go and find me a culprit!’ That’s what the commander told us to do!”". This is the opening line of the report 'From Sea to Prison', a statement by a translator who worked with the Italian Coast Guard. But the police themselves admit this over and again. According to the report, arrests, investigations and verdicts relating to 'boat drivers' happen in a rush. The passengers are not asked about the organizations behind the journey, i.e. the criminal groups organizing smuggling in the countries of departure. They are not asked if the person who drove the boat, or who assisted the driver, was forced to do so: the police are only interested in identifying the driver, without investigating any further. This is how a cigarette and being near to the helm of the boat managed to sentence Sakik and Kercek in Crotone - but there are thousands others like them.
In the case of the two young Turks, the Court of Appeal in Catanzaro will be asked to re-evaluate the first sentence issued by the court of Crotone. In this second trial, Sakik Mehmet has nominated the lawyer Arturo Salerni, the lawyer for the NGO Open Arms in the trial against Matteo Salvini. "I've just been appointed, and we're going to the appeal court, along with the lawyer from the first trial (Gianluca Marino, ndr), based on the fact that there isn't the evidential basis for such a heavy sentence being handed down to such a young man, about whom there has been no proof of any actual participation in an organization for smuggling migrants. We only have the account of the Customs Police, who saw him at the helm. There are no maps or anything else" explains Salerni, who also highlighted that "the rushed time-frame of the trial, the prison conditions of the young man, and the current distance from the point of the boat's departure, all rendered it very difficult to gather evidence around the case - but this does not excuse the important gaps in the evidence against Sakik."
According to Salerni, now an expert in these trials, "summary procedures against people arriving in Italy via often tragic, desperate journeys are becoming a shocking normality in our courts, superficially identifying a few people on the basis of behaviour that simply cannot be taken as evidence. In this context it's often necessary to have extra attention and support for the defence.
"On many occasions we find ourselves dealing with people who haven't had the chance to appoint their own lawyer or to carry out defence investigations, i.e. of using the instruments permitted by our procedures. Instead we seem to be stuck in a logic of having to find some kind of criminality, at any cost, within the behaviour of people fleeing situations of poverty, war and persecution, who are looking for shelter in our country." He concludes: "I sincerely hope that Sakik will be found innocent and that the sentence from the first trial will be overturned in appeal. His family is desperate: they call me almost every day from Istanbul, to express their concern and anxiety - their fear that they will never see their child again."
* The journalist originally wrote 'the number of sentences'. This data is not available; the report utilizes available police data on arrests: https://fromseatoprison.info/1-data/
