Carmelo Zuccaro, public prosecutor in Catania, says that NGOs do not always operate within the law and that they assist people smugglers, but Médecins Sans Frontières and the Italian Navy deny this.
A month ago, Carmelo Zuccaro, public prosecutor at the Catania prosecutor's office, pointed the finger for the first time at the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in migrant rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea. Drawing on data from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), Zuccaro put forward the hypothesis that there were links between certain NGOs operating their own vessels between Italy and Libya and the criminal organisations profiting from human trafficking.
Today the matter remains very much open and has turned into a fully fledged political case that risks undermining the credibility of the third sector, even though at present only one of the organisations operating in the Mediterranean is involved in an investigation — opened not by the Catania prosecutor's office but by that of Trapani.
Prosecutor Zuccaro, summoned to parliament by the Defence committee, reiterated a month on: "In some cases Libyan territorial waters have been crossed — these are confirmed data that I hold and that come from Frontex, the Coast Guard, and the Navy." In essence, NGO vessels, which usually operate close to the boundary of Libya's territorial waters, sometimes cross them: certainly for humanitarian reasons, Zuccaro explains, but nonetheless "communicating their position to people smugglers and creating transit routes that may constitute the offence of facilitating illegal immigration."
But even when NGO vessels remain in international waters, according to the prosecutor the very fact of sailing so far forward compared with the ships of the European Union's Mediterranean naval force (Eunavfor Med) would in practice end up benefiting people smugglers and increasing immigration: whereas previously the vessels of Eunavfor Med — the European rescue operation — managed to identify the mother ships and the leading smugglers, "now the traffickers can use worse boats, putting some of the migrants themselves at the helm to ensure their own impunity: occasional smugglers that the prosecutor's office cannot even prosecute, except for aiding and abetting."
According to Zuccaro, who proposes adopting telephone, electronic and satellite interceptions for the aerial monitoring of NGO vessels, "the number of people who have died at sea since the boats have been of worse quality has certainly increased — not in percentage terms but in absolute numbers."
The third suspicion is the most serious: outright links with criminal organisations. "One line of investigation that I find interesting is that directed at researching and identifying the sources of funding of more recently established NGOs," he says before the senators, in a hearing that was classified in several passages, "which demonstrably operate with considerable resources. Being able to understand who funds these organisations could give us very useful indications. Not to mention the presence within certain NGOs of individuals who are not entirely attributable to the world of philanthropy" — a reference that brings to mind the multi-billionaire George Soros, an indirect funder of Moas, the Maltese NGO ranked by Frontex among the least transparent.
Despite these allegations, no investigation has been opened in this regard by the Catania prosecutor's office (Zuccaro himself admits that "the investigations are at a standstill, at a dead end"), while the Trapani prosecutor's office is said to have opened one concerning a non-Italian NGO.
The entire non-profit world is beginning to suffer a serious backlash in terms of credibility and also fundraising. Marco Bertotto, Médecins Sans Frontières' head of advocacy, speaking before Zuccaro at the Senate hearing, described his accusations as "an instrumental attack on the world of NGOs — it is unworthy to call us a taxi service. The truth is twelve deaths a day in the Mediterranean; NGO vessels rescue 30 per cent of those shipwrecked without having any kind of contact with people smugglers."
Zuccaro's words are contradicted from several quarters: according to the commander-in-chief of the Italian Navy's naval squadron, Admiral Donato Marzano, NGO operations in the Mediterranean "have never constituted an obstacle to our operations."
Syracuse prosecutor Francesco Paolo Giordano states that there are no "oblique or contaminating connections between NGOs or parts of them and migrant traffickers," and even the president of the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (Copasir), Giacomo Stucchi of Lega Nord, flatly contradicted his party secretary Matteo Salvini, who had spoken of the existence of an intelligence dossier on relations between traffickers, people smugglers and civil society organisations: "No such dossier exists," Copasir assures.
