Lampedusan authorities disembark migrants from Libya, February 2015. Flickr/Jordi Bernabeu Farrus. Some rights reserved.In early December 2015 a group of Gambian migrants arrived at the local office of an Italian cultural association in Palermo. They each carried a ‘deferred refoulement decree’, or “7-days decree” as migrants have begun to call it, which obliged them to leave Italy via the airport of Fiumicino in 7 days. This was, however, an impossible order to fulfil, considering that they had been abandoned by the Italian Police at the railway station of Agrigento, without any money or information about where to go.
These young men from Gambia, having set off from the Libyan coast on a small vessel, had been rescued at sea on 20 November, after which they were brought to Lampedusa. They spent five days in the reception centre on the island where they had to undergo identification procedures and were forced to sign a paper they were unable to read as it was written in a language they did not understand. These procedures are part of the new EU ‘hotspot’ approach, which has recently been adopted in Lampedusa. Whilst UNHCR officers informed the migrants about the possibility of asking for international protection, they reported that they had no real access to any asylum procedures.
Ticking the right box
It was on the boat from Lampedusa to Porto Empedocle (near Agrigento) that the migrants received the 7-days decree. Moreover, whilst in the reception centre in Lampedusa they had been separated from a group of migrants from Eritrea, who were already in Lampedusa when they arrived, and who were also being transferred to Sicily. This last group had been given access to the asylum procedure however. This was a separation on the basis of nationality: migrants from countries with a high rate of international protection recognition versus migrants coming from all the other countries.
