“How can we expect a good lawyer from this centre? We’re only eating bread since we arrived,” a Tunisian man says. He is speaking to a Médecins Sans Frontière (MSF) staff member at a reception centre in the Sicilian city of Agrigento.
The staff member had tried explaining to a group of men – who recently crossed the Mediterranean Sea – that they were probably in an “accelerated” procedure. This means they are deemed by Italian authorities not to be vulnerable or from countries likely to produce refugees, she says. People in this situation could be at risk of a fast deportation.
The MSF team arrived at the centre to discover that of the 24 people taken there together, only 12 remain. The rest had likely left for other parts of Italy, or other European countries, potentially jeopardising their legal status.
The reception centre, once a wedding venue, is one of 14 centres for adults in Agrigento: as many as 120 people can be housed in shared rooms and basic conditions. Washing hangs from bushes. Many of the men staying longer term go out to work during the day, which MSF staff say is permitted – though they probably arrived before the rules came into force.
RM Block
More than 19,100 people arrived in Italy by sea between January and August, according to figures from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). This year, Bangladeshis have been the most common nationality, followed by Somalis, Algerians and Sudanese.
The arrival figures mark a drop on the previous two years, when arrivals to Italy exceeded 66,000. In 2023, they were above 157,000. Yet the reasons people leave their countries have not gone away. Many making the dangerous sea journey to Europe have fled crushing poverty, dictatorships and oppression, war, or situations where climate change is playing a role in destroying traditional ways of life.
Now, the situation for new arrivals is changing, with civil society organisations struggling to figure out what new European rules, including the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, will mean in practice.
The real picture
“Can I cry?” asks Alessandra Governa, sitting in her office in Palermo, when asked about the pact. “It seems that no one really understands the real picture, or the whole picture ... at this moment it’s difficult [to see] how to support, assess and understand what is happening but I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
Governa is a social worker supervisor with an MSF project that helps torture survivors. She has been working with new arrivals to Italy for the past decade.
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In that time, the political attitude to migration has changed a lot, she says.
Family reunion has become more difficult, with routes to reach protection becoming “narrower and narrower”, while there is “no other way to arrive in a regular, safe [way],” she says.
She says the asylum process, and everything that happens after arrival in Europe, could already be considered another form of torture. New changes seem to be putting people that were usually protected, such as women or families, “in a very long limbo in which they have no information, no rights and, at the end, you have just produced irregular people”.
She expects the pact to affect “the possibility of integration”. That doesn’t include the prospect that new arrivals could soon be deported to so-called “third countries” to which they have no connection.
The result, Governa suggests, will be more people dying.
EU pact
The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum came into force in June. Among many provisions, it allows for people to be detained for a longer period – up to 18 months, or 24 in certain cases.
In Italy, various interviewees raised concerns about conditions in pre-removal centres (known as CPRs). In 2024, the Council of Europe criticised “widespread practice of the administration of unprescribed psychotropic drugs diluted in water to foreign nationals” in the centres and “found several cases of alleged physical ill-treatment and excessive use of force by police officers”.
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It also criticised the layout and design of the centres, saying detainees are “effectively being warehoused”. A spokesperson for the Italian interior ministry referred us to the European Commission for comment. A spokesperson for the European Commission said the pact introduces “firm but fair internal rules”, while the “Reception Conditions Directive provides for minimum standards of assistance and reception for asylum applicants across the EU”.
“Under the pact, safeguards and the protection of fundamental rights apply, including information provision, free legal counselling, the right to legal assistance and representation, the right to appeal, special procedural needs and high protection standards and safeguards for minors and vulnerable people. The pact also includes provisions aimed at supporting integration from an early stage,” the spokesperson said.
“Member states are responsible for ensuring full compliance with the EU law, including for establishing the new independent monitoring mechanisms to monitor compliance with fundamental rights during the screening and asylum border procedure.”
In an explainer on the pact, Human Rights Watch says it sees some reforms as positive, including the guarantee of access to education for child asylum seekers within two months, while adult asylum seekers will have the right to work after a maximum of six months.
But, overall, the new rules will “undermine the right to asylum by making it easier for governments to rush the assessment of protection claims, limit safeguards in asylum processing, and boost the prevalence and duration of detention for asylum seekers,” the organisation says.
Trauma
Various interviewees working with new arrivals are concerned that faster procedures can be incompatible with the time needed to disclose and describe the traumatic suffering that people have gone through, and that abuse along a migration route should be taken into account but is often disregarded.
“For us it’s clear that the direction of the pact is just to restrict the chances for people to get here ... and just reject people and send them back,” says Valentina Sori, a social operator with Mediterranean Hope FCEI (Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy), which works on the frontline island of Lampedusa.
As the only civilian organisation present when new arrivals come on shore, Sori says they try to “make the moment ... a bit more human, because everything is so controlled”.
The first thing people do when they get internet connection is “call home and tell their families and friends that they’re still alive”.
Some tell her they have tried many times to cross. One man was successful on his eighth attempt. “What we always say is that we would like to see and to have humanitarian corridors, legal ways for people to come to Europe without risking their lives.”
Marco Musso, a case manager with MSF, began working in Italian reception centres in 2012 when “it was a lot easier.” He says the quality of services has drastically reduced, with spending falling by two thirds in 12 years. “For example, no psychologists. No social workers. Hybrid people doing everything.” He says this is related to competition to run the centres, which involves trying to spend as little as possible.
[We try to] make the moment ... a bit more human, because everything is so controlled
— Valentina Sori, Mediterranean Hope FCEI
Musso says the system can be very removed from reality. He speaks about a patient who lost his arm in Bangladesh and had been recognised for asylum, but took a long time to get a residency permit because he was required to give fingerprints for both his hands.
Now, to assess whether they will go into an accelerated procedure that could lead to a fast deportation, Musso says many new arrivals are first asked about vulnerabilities by a police officer: someone in uniform whom traumatised new arrivals can have difficulty trusting.
He says official decisions can be based on a person’s declarations, when they might not themselves understand how to define the abuse they have lived through. “It’s like if the doctor asks you are you allergic to something, I might know or don’t know.”
Many people get confused about dates, he says, because of trauma or not having had access to anything to keep time. This can lead to a quick ruling that their case is “unfounded”. There are also things that people will not disclose because of stigma: for example, men who were raped, or someone who was forced to kill someone else, he says.
MSF often provides patients with certificates confirming their medical condition and aspects of what they have been through, though Musso worries about the people who are not referred to them, and do not have access to a lawyer to help them understand their experiences. Those receiving help through the MSF project which treats torture survivors include Somalis, Nigerians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The abuse they experienced includes beatings and sexual violence.
In Agrigento, MSF doctor Giuseppe Pulin says he treats new arrivals most regularly for problems caused by unhygienic conditions in Libya or Tunisia, such as skin or teeth infections; and pain after violence, including scars, bone fractures and joint pain. He treats tropical diseases such as tuberculosis. He has also seen sexual violence victims of both genders.
Exploitation
Fausto Melluso, the president of Arci Palermo, a branch of the nationwide non-profit organisation, first interacted with people going through the asylum procedure more than a decade ago. It was already “exhausting” and took years, but overall Italy was still a place of “emigration, not immigration” and new arrivals could stay. Now, he imagines people will still stay but become “invisible, without the possibility of creating a life”. There will always be economic fields ready to exploit them, he says.
Longer periods of detention, will “just make things worse”. He says looking at people “with themes of the enemy” will “create less safety”.
“The European policies on migration are not based on the reality. In the reality, we would need a way for people to come where they are not falling in the hands of smugglers,” he says, suggesting people could use money spent on smugglers to build a life instead. “If we don’t speak about migration in a normal way you will run after the extremist or xenophobic policies ... The system is not working and no one is speaking about this.”
Painful thoughts
Back in Agrigento, MSF psychologist Federica Curci is giving a group of mostly Egyptian men advice on managing painful thoughts.
“A long journey, the difficult situations you leave at home with your family, they can have a hard impact on your mind,” she tells them. “The stress can lead to sleeping problems, nightmares. This can influence our body, our heart racing, difficulties breathing, feeling hyperactive or nervous, or we feel very weak or tired.”
“We’re still worried that we’re going to be sent back,” a man says.
“We understand that the worries and the thoughts can’t be eliminated so we try to find some strategies,” says Curci. She speaks about breathing exercises. “It might sound banal but actually the breathing can help us calm our muscles, our heartbeat, try to create a situation of calmness for our bodies.” She suggests trying to smell something strong and nice.
“It’s why we smoke and don’t eat,” one man responds.
“It’s a strategy but I’m not going to say it’s good because smoking hurts the health,” says Curci. She hands around perfume for them to smell instead.
The group is sitting under trees, the sound of cicadas loud nearby. “Unfortunately the new procedures mean we don’t have a lot of time, it’s all in a rush. So it’s important we find this time and space,” Curci tells them.
