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Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi during the taping of the television program Porta a Porta - Source: Reuters -
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Italy's government defended a new policy to immediately deport
migrants intercepted at sea despite a barrage of criticism from
rights groups, Catholic organisations and a senior Vatican
official.
Italy sent back a boat carrying 227 migrants to Libya instead of
allowing them on shore to seek refugee status, drawing an outcry
from critics who said it violated international law and put migrant
lives at risk.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said the new policy did not break
any laws or treaties.
Italy had the right to send back migrant boats who had yet to
enter Italian waters, he said.
"I don't see any scandal here," Berlusconi told a news conference,
blaming the left for opening the doors to migrants.
"The left's idea is of a multi-ethnic Italy. That's not our idea,
ours is to welcome only those who meet the conditions for political
asylum."
Interior Minister Roberto Maroni pledged to continue a policy he
said was legal and backed by Italians.
Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Italy would be encouraging
traffickers if it accepted migrants in non-Italian waters.
The comments came after Monsignor Agostino Marchetto, the Vatican's
immigration expert, and the Vatican newspaper took the government
to task over the policy.
"International law states that possible asylum-seekers should
not be rejected, and until there is a way to ascertain that, all
migrants should be considered 'presumed refugees,'" Marchetto told
the Ansa news agency.
Vatican paper L'Osservatore Romano said it was worrying that asylum
seekers may be among those being deported. The Italian Bishops'
Conference also attacked the administration for making illegal
immigration a crime.
Organisations ranging from Doctors Without Borders to the United
Nations refugee agency have also been quick to condemn the policy
to send back migrant boats, allowing the opposition to gloat over
attacks on the government without their help.
"For once, there's no need for our words, because all the
organisations related to international law and rights groups are
speaking," centre-left leader Dario Franceschini said.
Left-leaning daily La Repubblica quoted coastguard officials who
said they were ashamed to follow orders to deport the migrants, who
began yelling Brothers, help us when they realised they were being
sent back.
"When we took them on board from three boats they thanked us for
saving them. At that moment, knowing that we would have to send
them back, my heart became small, small," one official told the
newspaper.
"I couldn't tell them that we were taking them back to the
inferno from where they escaped with their lives."
But an informal poll by Sky Tg24 news channel showed that 82% of
Italians supported the government's decision to divert migrants
back to Libya rather than take them in.
