Enrico Letta is promising new standards for refugee holding centres.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Prime
Minister Enrico Letta pledged Monday to overhaul conditions in Italy's
overcrowded refugee holding centres following outrage over a video of
migrants being hosed down naked in the cold to disinfect them.
The
government had already pledged to improve conditions for welcoming
refugees - and received $40 million in EU pledges to do so - after more
than 360 would-be refugees drowned off the southern island of Lampedusa
in October.
The government was put on the defensive anew after
Italian state television last week broadcast a video taken by a migrant
of about a dozen men at the Lampedusa holding centre being forced to
strip in the cold to be hosed down and disinfected for scabies.
Refugee advocates denounced the practice as violating the rights of the migrants and unworthy of a civilized country.
Lampedusa,
a tiny strip of rock closer to Africa than the Italian mainland, is the
destination of choice for smuggling operations from northern Africa and
has become ground zero in the increasingly volatile debate over how
Italy - and Europe as a whole - deals with waves of people fleeing war
and oppression from Somalia to Syria.
Letta noted that 2013 saw a
three-fold increase in the number of migrants arriving over 2012, and
that its holding centres are currently overflowing with 16,000 people.
That
pressure, he said, is compelling the government "to immediately get to
work on a comprehensive revision of the standards of the (centres) and
the way we receive migrants in its entirety."