A procession with hundreds of people, activists from social centers and self-employed workers who arrived from all over Italy to protest against the reopening of the CPR. There were at least 600, according to the police headquarters, who moved from Piazza Robilant, in the San Paolo district, towards Corso Brunelleschi, throwing some smoke bombs under the Lancia building, paper bombs in front of the Martini hospital and leaving behind them protest writings on the walls. Banners like «Cpr lager» and «the Cpr still burn, against state racism and its accomplices». Slogans: “torture in there”, “freedom for migrants” characterized the demonstration organized by the Gabrio social centre, contained and monitored, step by step, by the deployed police forces.
Turin, demonstration against the CPR: protesters deface McDonald’s
However, it is not just the antagonists who do not want the center dedicated to the repatriation of migrants defined as “irregular” to reopen. Already in recent weeks several voices had united to ask for alternative solutions, other intended uses, starting from District 3 which only a few days ago organized a discussion together with bodies and associations such as the Pastorale Migrants and the Abele Group. The councilor Jacopo Rosatelli he made it known that he had written to the Ministry of the Interior and that he wanted to request a meeting with the prefect. Everyone agrees in defining the CPR as an “inhuman” place.
The Corso Brunelleschi center was closed in the spring of 2023 after protests inside by migrants who set fires making it unusable. “About a year and a half ago, the CPR was destroyed by the anger of the inmates, making one piece of the Italian expulsion machine materially more fragile”, the organizers of the march explained into a megaphone.
The protests arose after the suicide of Moussa Balde, a boy originally from Guinea who took his own life in the CPR at the age of 22, a few days after his arrival from Ventimiglia. He had been brought there after a brutal beating suffered on the street while he was begging: three of them, later sentenced to light sentences, had kicked, punched and barred him. Balde had been placed in the “hospital”, the isolation health area, on suspicion, without any justification, of a skin disease. And he, in desperation, had taken his own life by hanging himself with a sheet. Precisely because of that suicide, the prosecutor’s office had opened an investigation which had revealed all the shortcomings of the centre, focusing precisely on the gaps in health surveillance, for not having assessed the risk of suicide, and on the improper use of the small hospital, where the migrants with psychological and behavioral problems. In recent days the preliminary hearing ended with the indictment for Annalisa Spatarodirector of the CPR chosen by the Gepsa company which had the contract at the time and for Fulvio Pitantithe doctor at the facility who examined Balde and confined him in solitary confinement. There was also a policeman under accusation, Fabio Fierroaccused of having changed service reports, who however closed his position by agreeing to a one-year deal.
