The suicide of a detainee has sounded yet another alarm about the problematic situation and living conditions in Italy's detention centers. On Sunday, February 4, 22-year-old Ousmane Sylla, a Guinean migrant, took his own life in the Ponte Galeria repatriation center (CPR), southwest of Rome. The young man's death sparked protests from other detainees, who set fire to their mattresses and clashed with the police. The latter used tear gas and arrested fourteen people held in the center, in an episode that is far from isolated.
A few days before his suicide, Sylla had been transferred from the CPR in Trapani, Sicily, following a protest movement by detained migrants. Before hanging himself, he wrote on the wall of his new cell: "If I die, I'd like them to send my body to Africa, my mother would be happy. The Italian military knows nothing except money. I miss Africa very much and my mother should not cry for me. May I rest in peace." The public prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into incitement to suicide.
Thanks to his status as a member of parliament, Riccardo Magi, MP and secretary of the liberal +Europa party, was able to visit the Ponte Galeria CPR on Sunday, between two waves of clashes with the forces of law and order. "As in all the CPRs I was able to visit, the situation inside is inhumane," he told Le Monde. "Detainees say they haven't had a hot meal in weeks. There's no hot water, no proper bedding, and a general state of filth. Prisoners who are not in revolt are numb because of the psychotropic drugs administered to render them harmless."
The use of drugs for control purposes in detention centers has been established by an investigation conducted by the Italian magazine Altreconomia. Apart from the rare journalistic works of this kind, which gather information that is difficult to filter from the inside, and the testimonies of parliamentarians and human rights defenders who may visit them, the reality of these sites is largely invisible.
There are ten CPRs in Italy, run by private service providers and spread across the country, with a capacity of around a thousand detainees. The detainees are undocumented immigrants who have not applied for asylum, or who come from safe third countries and are subject to expulsion proceedings. "CPRs are legal voids, where all defense rights are impeded," explained Salvatore Fachile, an asylum law specialist at the Antartide lawyer's office in Rome. "With their telephones seized, detainees have very limited means of communication with the outside world and contacting lawyers to challenge their detention."
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