Repatriation Permanence Centers: 500 lives imprisoned and treated with psychotropic drugs, violating all rights

VERONA – From the very rich site of Blackness – the paper and online periodical that has been chronicling Africa for 141 years, founded in 1883 by the Comboni missionaries – we learn a reality that is already strange. And that is that the CPRs, the Permanence Centers for Repatriations, are exactly places of true “detention”, where people are “imprisoned” without having committed any crime, but simply waiting to be repatriated. However, the rights provided for prisoners in Italian prisons are guaranteed.

The fundamental rights of people are trampled upon. This is the definition given by the 8 CPRs (Retention and Repatriation Centres) that the Asylum and Immigration Roundtable, made up of over 40 Italian civil society organizations, visited. «In these places – we read in the report, where you can find numbers and descriptions of the situations encountered – people’s fundamental rights are trampled on every day. The people – he writes Blackness – are abandoned to themselves, little or not at all informed about their rights and their future.

The intolerable use of psychotropic drugs. Alongside the state of abandonment is “a intolerable abuse of psychotropic drugs”, the denial of the right to defense, practically impossible, or managed in an uneven and in any case arbitrary manner. It wouldn’t seem to be there nothing new under this sun which once again illuminates these legalized prisons where violations of rights have been taking place for over 25 years, aggravated by the fact that none of the purposes for which they were designed since the now very distant Consolidated Law on Immigration of 1998 is achieved. Next to Tablethe parliamentarians and regional councilors of the opposition forces of the current government, forces which in any case have never taken steps to change course with respect to a stabilization of this system of containment of migrant people.

System which, as the report reminds us, has one under its belt waste of public moneymore than 40 deaths since it was established, systematic violence and reports of self-harm and suicide attempts by people locked up without having committed any crime.

The Table managed to gain access to the centers in most cases (two centers where obstructionism occurred). This gave the possibility of collecting quantitative data and detecting qualitative aspects with respect to both the structures and the conditions of detention of people. These “places-non-places” where there are “cells crammed with people, where time never passes, located mostly far from the sight of ordinary citizens”.

More than 500 “guests/detainees”, mostly men, of various origins, mostly North African (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt) and sub-Saharan (Nigeria, Gambia), who arrive from prison, from the street, but also from landings. There are several asylum seekers who by law should not be there. So much disorientation, estrangements; several take drugs without knowing why and are administered psychotropic drugs on a massive scale.

Faced with this picture, on the centenary of Franco Basaglia’s birth, the panel underlines how striking it is “to note that such dehumanizing total institutions exist in the heart of Europe”.