The Italian authorities stranded refugees without food or shoes in car parks outside Rome and Milan, says the UN. Italy is struggling to deal with the 50,000 immigrants that have arrived this year and has asked the EU to help mitigate the crisis.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has condemned Italy’s
treatment of a group of refugees who were found abandoned outside
Milan and Rome in what the organization described as an
“unacceptable” incident.
The refugees “were found without shoes, disorientated, and
without having been given anything to eat or drink,” said
the EU body’s spokesperson Carlotta Sami told AFP. The immigrants
from Mali, Guinea Bissau, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Syria were
transported in two busloads to Milan and Rome where they were
abandoned in car parks.
They were originally part of a larger contingent of 1,300
immigrants who were intercepted by the Italian authorities and
transported to the city of Taranto on Monday.
"There were two groups of between 160 to 170 people each. One
of the groups was abandoned near Rome, the other near
Milan," Carlotta Sami said. She went on to say that the
immigrants had been told they were being sent to centers for
asylum seekers.
Those who had been left close to Rome were eventually relocated
to a center for asylum seekers, while the refugees in Milan were
reportedly still in the car park late on Tuesday afternoon.
Italy has been hit by an influx of illegal immigrants since the
beginning of this year, with over 50,000 illegal immigrants
seeking refuge in the Mediterranean country since January. The
government has been hard-pressed to deal with the situation and
has called on the EU to intervene.
Last month Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano issued the
EU with an ultimatum, threatening to allow immigrants passage
into other European nations if Brussels does not lend a hand.
“The European Union has two options: either it comes to the
Mediterranean to put the EU flag on Mare Nostrum [the Latin name
for the sea] or we will let migrants with right of asylum leave
for other countries,” Alfano tweeted.
The Italian Navy is regularly forced to mount rescue missions off
the south coast of Italy when boats overloaded with refugees sink
on their way across. In the latest incident, Italian coastguards
said that three immigrants drowned and six were missing on
Tuesday.
The situation is unlikely to improve in the near future, with the
Interior Ministry estimating that between 400,000 and 600,000
people are waiting in Libya to make the perilous crossing.