Reportage
Maysoon Majidi: The Cutro Decree must stop
The story of Maysoon Majidi, who was detained for 10 months in Calabria before being acquitted, is a prime example to understand the harm that the combination of the Consolidated Immigration Act and the Cutro Decree is doing.
During her trial, Maysoon Majidi, who was accused of being a people smuggler and later acquitted, had been referred to as a “boat stewardess” in the prosecutor’s indictment. This disparaging expression served to frame the crime the Iranian-Kurdish woman had supposedly committed: distributing water and food on the boat carrying her and other people fleeing violence to Italy. Two migrants reported this, according to the court’s translation, although their testimony was never recorded or verified.
“I told the judge that during the crossing I was seasick and menstruating and that I couldn’t even stand,” Majidi recounts now that she is free. “But if I had been able to, and if there really had been water and food on the boat, I would have distributed it, because there were people who needed it, including 25 children.”
“If I could go back, I’d do it again,” she stresses, after being treated as a criminal just for being on the boat.
The story of Maysoon Majidi, who was detained for 10 months in Calabria before being acquitted, is a prime example to understand the harm that the combination of the Consolidated Immigration Act and the Cutro Decree is doing. Article 12 of the Decree, conceived in haste after the tragedy whose victims were migrants on the Calabrian coast, toughens the penalties for the crime of favoring illegal immigration and says that those who are on boats leaving Libya and make any humanitarian gesture whatsoever towards the other migrants on board can be charged.
“The Cutro Decree has created this performative anxiety that leads to having to make arrests at all costs, and this has to stop,” Majidi said at the Berlinguer Hall of the Chamber of Deputies, where she was invited, together with Riccardo Noury of Amnesty International and Parisa Nazari (Woman, Life, Freedom activist), by the PD (from which Laura Boldrini and Chiara Braga were present) and the Green-Left Alliance (represented by Marco Grimaldi).
She asked the audience directly: “Do you think the goal of Article 12 is to arrest traffickers or does it serve as a deterrent for refugees who decide to come to Italy?”
Majidi is not the one who has suffered such treatment. There are currently around 1,300 people in Italian prisons who were arrested because they are believed to be people smugglers. Most of them only found themselves at the helm of a boat because they were forced to, by violence or the need to survive.
“The concept of a ‘people smuggler’ is outdated,” the Amnesty spokesman explained. “The criminals are the traffickers who stay on land and are careful not to get on the boats, least of all pilot them. On board, there are migrants who might have been doctors, teachers or filmmakers in their regular life, who are ordered to hold the wheel and point the boat towards land.”
One of them is Marjan Jamali, a 30-year-old Iranian woman who fled to Italy with her 8-year-old son and is still under house arrest in Locri because she is accused of being a smuggler by the same men who assaulted her during the voyage. Majidi has chosen to serve as a mouthpiece for her story.
“Article 12 considers financial gain to be merely an aggravating factor in the crime, not a defining part of the case,” Boldrini stressed, ”so if there is a boat with migrants that is adrift and someone on board takes action to bring it safely ashore, they risk finding themselves charged with this crime. But favoring illegal immigration should be established when profit is an element, not just for finding oneself in a dangerous situation, in which everyone would work to control that boat.”
According to Grimaldi, “the point is that the crime of favoring illegal immigration is being used as a pretext to punish migrant people – a trend that the Meloni government has made even worse.” And one which has become even more outrageous after the Elmasry case. One cannot fail to be struck by the paradox that while migrants are forced to endure a legal ordeal after a life-threatening crossing, those who tortured them in Libya are freed and taken home on a state-owned plane.
“This scandal leads us to understand that the externalization of borders is inseparable from economic issues, and bringing a torturer back home on a state flight is the illustration of this contradiction,” Grimaldi stressed. ”The Meloni government has an obscene way of getting on a moral high horse.” The two deputies have asked Prime Minister Meloni to meet with the Iranian-Kurdish activist.
“To the Italian government, I want to say that we political refugees are not criminals. Fascist, racist, and fanatical ideologies, which are becoming more and more widespread, are the real danger, not the people who are fleeing from those ideologies or regimes in search of safety,” Majidi concluded, accompanied by her younger brother, who, after their forced separation, never leaves her side.
After the event at the Chamber of Deputies, on Thursday afternoon, the Iranian-Kurdish activist paid a visit to the editorial office of il manifesto to deliver us a heartfelt message: “Thank you for your support and sympathy throughout the struggle to uphold my innocence. Journalism is a powerful weapon.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/maysoon-majidi-il-decreto-cutro-va-cambiato on 2025-02-14