Innocent

First they received 18 months in pre-trial detention, then the trial acquitted them all for not having committed the crime. The judicial adventure - or it should be said the odyssey - of four Eritrean citizens who in 2015 were accused of criminal association and aiding illegal immigration for helping their compatriots in Rome lasted seven years. The Court of Cassation, in recent weeks, with a sentence definitively sanctioned their innocence, which had been shouted and claimed several times not only by those directly concerned.

The context is that of the eviction, in Rome, in May 2015, of the Ponte Mammolo slum, an informal settlement where people from different countries lived, including Eritreans, Ukrainians, South Americans. A place, known as “il Borghetto”, which a few months earlier had risen to the headlines for an unexpected visit from Pope Francis. That place made up of shacks, which had become the home of many, was also a place of refuge for many transiting people who passed through Rome and made a brief stop there with the aim of reaching the other cities of northern Europe.

According to the accusation, that of Borghetto was the cell of an international network, which acted for profit, with defined tasks and roles and a precise chain of command, operating from Africa to Italy exploiting the skin of migrants: a this accusation turned out to be inconsistent during the various stages of the trial.
For 4 Eritreans the accusation of aiding and abetting illegal immigration remained standing, but it has now been ascertained that in fact the conduct that was reproached had to do with the help and hospitality between friends and compatriots, and not with trafficking in human beings.

One had been arrested in the act of crime while buying a bus ticket that would take his brother and some of his friends from Rome to Germany; others had offered help and hospitality for a few days to some newly disembarked compatriots; another had been contacted by a friend to help his daughter. In practice, gestures of friendship and solidarity, not crimes. Also in recent weeks, with a decree of dismissal by the prosecutor of Trapani, the accusations of aiding illegal immigration against Don Mosè Zerai, the Eritrean priest who has been involved for years in helping refugees, have also fallen. Charges, those that had been addressed to him, as infamous as unfounded.

Let us cherish an awareness: in the years that we immediately have behind us it has unfortunately happened many times that not the real traffickers have been hit, but the simple networks of human solidarity. It has happened that many errors of evaluation have been made, it has happened that a distorted communication, even of an ideological and political nature, has blown the fire of opposition regardless. It was a bad page in our civil history. Today the topic no longer seems central to the public debate as it was just three or five years ago, but the profound implications of that thinking are not yet totally alien to the hearts of the people. The hope is that sentences and decisions will help us rethink, for good, what has been.

Stefano Caredda
NP June / July 2022