around a hundred migrants arrive in Italy after being held in Libyan camps

We are far from the images of Lampedusa. A reception committee awaited Tuesday March 5 at Rome airport the 97 migrants sometimes held for several years in detention camps in Libya. They are the first to benefit from an agreement signed in December between the Italian government and a series of organizations to set up humanitarian corridors between Libya and Italy. In all there are 1 500 people who must arrive in this framework in three years.

Aicha, who came from the Central African Republic and her four children, could have been in the boats arriving in southern Italy. She searched “six times” to flee Libyan detention centers. “We were arrested each time. Then we were brought back to Libya. Each time it was prison. I was locked up, beaten, raped…”

“Relations with the Libyan authorities are improving”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which can enter some of these terrible centers, has identified particularly vulnerable people among the thousands held there. “Relations with the Libyan authorities are improvingexplains Chiara Cardoletti, UNHCR representative for Italy and the Vatican. We have a greater dialogue, which allows us to intervene to save refugee lives.”

While their asylum application is being examined, the visa the exiles received is only valid for Italy. If they went elsewhere, they would go underground again. “It is a legal framework to save them which involves the local communities which welcome them”, explains Marco Lmpagliazzo who presides over the Sant’egidio Christian community. The organizations are committed to housing exiles throughout Italy.