Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Thursday pledged to crack down on human traffickers, after leading her Cabinet on a visit near the site of a migrant shipwreck that claimed at least 72 lives.
As demonstrators accused her right-wing government of risking lives with its hard line on migration, Meloni shifted the focus from those taking leaky boats across the Mediterranean to those who exploit them.
She said her ministers had agreed a decree that would hand up to 30 years in prison to traffickers who cause migrant deaths or serious injury.
Photo: AFP
At least 72 people, including many children, perished when their overcrowded boat sank in stormy weather off the coast of the southern region of Calabria on Feb. 26.
“We are determined to defeat human trafficking, which is responsible for this tragedy,” Meloni told reporters following a cabinet meeting. “Our response to what happened is a policy of greater firmness on the ground.”
Emotions are raw in Cutro and Crotone, the towns nearest the shipwreck, as relatives arrive from afar to claim their dead. Bodies were still being spotted out at sea this week or washing up on beaches.
“Nobody saved them. And they could have,” read a poster with a child’s drawing of a family on a storm-tossed boat, hung outside a sports hall in Crotone where the coffins of drowned people have been laid out.
Ahead of the Cabinet meeting in Cutro, several dozen demonstrators gathered, surrounded by riot police.
Student Antonio Viterutti said he wanted to “denounce the hypocrisy of the Italian government that leaves a boatload of people fleeing hunger, war and misery to die at sea and comes here today to do a political stunt.”
The decree would give preferential quotas to workers from countries that help Italy fight human traffickers and conduct campaigns to warn people of the danger they face, Meloni said.
“We want the people to know the risks they run in putting themselves in the hands of traffickers,” she added.
Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party won elections last year on a pledge to curb sea arrivals, and her governing coalition, which includes former Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s League party, has clamped down on charity rescue boats.
Critics said the government’s policy of treating migrant boats as a law enforcement issue, rather than a humanitarian one, might have fatally delayed the rescue last month.
The Central Mediterranean is the world’s most dangerous maritime crossing.
There are also questions about the treatment of the estimated 80 survivors. One lawmaker who visited some of them reported poor conditions, without enough beds or provisions for children.
Meloni and her ministers rejected accusations that they failed to intervene to save the boat, which set off from Turkey and was carrying Afghan, Iranian, Pakistani and Syrian nationals.
Prosecutors have opened an investigation into the disaster, which occurred despite EU border agency Frontex saying it had alerted Italian authorities to the heavily overcrowded boat.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS