Strasbourg, 26/10/2005 (Agence Europe) - Members of the European Parliament from four political groups who recently visited the Centro di permanenza temporanea at Lampedusa, in Sicily, confirmed on 25 October in Strasbourg before the press that they will insist on their request for the Italian Interior Affairs Minister Mr Pisanu to appear before the committee on public freedoms to explain the situation the camp, where hundreds of migrants and asylum-seekers are treated in an unacceptable way. The true conditions at Lampedusa were shown in Strasbourg in a documentary made for the Italian TV channel LA7 by Mauro Parissone, and explained at a hearing with another Italian journalist, Fabrizio Gatti, from the weekly paper L'Espresso, who went undercover in the camp, first being taken for a Romanian, then for an Iraqi.
“Thank you, Fabrizio Gatti, thank goodness we have the freedom of the press”, said the French socialist Martine Roure, who led the delegation in Lampedusa and who pointed out that the MEPs, who were not able to go to the camp “unexpectedly” but had to arrange the visit, found only eleven people in the camp. “Then we quickly grasped what was going on”, commented Ms Roure, who reproached the Italian authorities for committing the “colossal error” of having emptied Lampedusa before the MEPs arrived. “A colleague from the PPE, who was rather frank, said to us: I hope that they'll have left a hundred or so of them!”, Ms Roure recounted. Our committee on freedoms wants to visit all reception centres for migrants, and it started with Lampedusa because recurring problems are regularly reported there, she explained. Sarah Ludford, who was representing her ALDE group colleague Jeannine Hennis-Plaschaert (she having been part of the mission to Lampedusa), was indignant: the Italian authorities told us that between April and October there were on average between 350 and 400 people in the camp - although the capacity is 180 - but a day before the MEPs' visit there were only eleven, and one week later numbers were back up to several hundred. The British liberal denounced not only the violence and abuse in the camp, but also the legal uncertainty which reigns there. This anomaly was also criticised by the Dutch green Kataljne Buitenweg, who complained: it is not even clear what kind of camp it is, they talked to us of an identification camp, we know that people who have passed through there have been sent to Libya under the Rome-Tripoli agreement, but we don't know what is in that agreement. We went to Lampedusa to offer our solidarity, if they considered it helpful, but ultimately we were “very angry” because they were laughing at us. Giusto Catania (GUE/NGL, Italy), who went with the mission, added: they tricked us, “we were lucky that Gatti was there” to tell us how things really are. The Rifondazione comunista/Sinistra europea MEP said with irony: we were told that Italy organises eleven flights a day to Libya, transporting only Egyptians. How did they know they were Egyptians when at Lampedusa “Gatti was first Romanian, then Iraqi”? A centre like that “creates illegal immigration, it should be closed”, he said. Minister Pisanu told us that he would come to our Parliamentary committee only when his counterparts from other countries we will visit come too, but he shows a lack of institutional respect for the Parliament. Will the matter be taken to the plenary again? I think that we could do it once we have heard Mr Pisanu's explanations, said Giusto Catania.