BY HARUT SASSOUNIAN

Robert Spano, President of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), visited Turkey last week at the invitation of the Turkish Justice Minister. Spano also met with Pres. Erdogan and give a lecture at the Turkish Justice Academy.

While the President of ECHR has the right to visit any country he wishes, it is highly inappropriate that he accepts an Honorary Doctorate in law from Istanbul University. Several prominent Turkish human rights activists wrote lengthy columns criticizing Spano for his visit and his acceptance of the Honorary Doctorate.

Former Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen stated that Spano “is not fit to preside [over] the ECHR.” Cenkiz Aktar, a political scientist and academic, called Spano’s visit “scandalous” and urged him to resign. Exiled Turkish journalist Can Dundar wrote that Spano “destroyed the 30-year reputation of the ECHR in three days.” Ahval News quoted several other critical comments from prominent Turks regarding the unfortunate Spano’s visit to Turkey.

Mehmet Altan, one of those critics, is among the 192 professors of Istanbul University who was fired at the instigation of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Altan, jailed for his non-existent membership in the banned Gulen religious group, filed a lawsuit against Istanbul University to reverse his firing. Erdogan also dismissed over 150,000 civil servants from state jobs and investigated close to 600,000 Turkish citizens, arresting 100,000 of them under the false pretext of belonging to the Islamist Gulen movement which was accused of orchestrating the coup attempt against Erdogan in 2016.

The Turkish Ahval News website posted on August 31, 2020, an article titled, “ECHR chief may receive controversial honorary doctorate from Istanbul University.”

 

ECHR chair Robert Spano with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey

Ahval reported that Altan, in an open letter addressed to Spano and published on the website of Turkish journalism platform P24, urged him not to accept the Turkish invitation. “I do not know how much pride there is to be an honorary member of a university that condemns hundreds of lecturers to unemployment and poverty by unjustly expelling them from school,” Altan wrote.

Altan told Spano: “The University from which you will receive a doctorate is included as the ‘defendant institution’ in the lawsuit of academics, like me, who were dismissed by decree…. These cases are still ongoing and it is likely that they will come before the ECHR, which you preside over.”

Altan continued: “On March 2018, the second section of ECHR, presided over by you, set a precedent in universal law and ruled that my right to personal liberty and security and my freedom of expression had been violated. Turkey was convicted…. Ergin Ergul, who was appointed on behalf of Turkey to that case and was the only judge dissenting, put forward such arguments that you wrote ‘a dissenting vote’ against a dissenting vote, for the first time in the history of ECHR, if I am not mistaken. And the other members followed you.”
Ahval reported that there were over 60,000 individual complaints at the ECHR for violations of rights and freedoms in Turkey.

Yavuz Aydin, who was also dismissed from his profession along with 4,500 judges and prosecutors, wrote an article titled, “ECHR president faces a test of honor in Turkey,” which was published in Ahval on Sept. 2, 2020. Aydin wrote: “President Spano is certainly aware of the deterioration of rule of law in Turkey. As a man of honor who has been adjudicating on Turkey-related files at the ECHR for years, the purpose of his visit cannot be thought of as anything other than openly and courageously shouting out facts in the faces of government authorities.”

Aydin continued: “The ECHR president knows very well that the government in Turkey translated to one-man rule by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since the constitutional amendment of 2017. As openly criticized by the Venice Commission, Spano knows that the separation of powers and judicial independence no longer exist in Turkey. Besides this, he cannot be unaware of Resolution 2156(2017) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which downgraded Turkey to the league of countries under monitoring status for the first time in European history. This decision implies that Turkey no longer meets the famous Copenhagen Criteria, and thus cannot be regarded as eligible for accession negotiations with the EU [European Union].”

Aydin then made a series of suggestions that he hoped Spano would follow during his visit to Turkey:

• Call on Erdogan to return to democracy and restore the rule of law in the country.
• Remind the Turkish leaders of the decision to remove from the Turkish Council of Judges and Prosecutors their observer status in the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary. He should also remind the candidate judges at the Turkish Judiciary Academy [TJA] why the European Judicial Training Network expelled the TJA from observer membership status in 2016.
• Tell them that the existing judges as well as the 10,000 new judges appointed after the coup attempt are often politically biased in applying the law, and call on them to ignore political pressure from the Palace, Constitutional Court and other high courts.
• Remind them that for the first time in history Turkey was found in breach of Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
• Tell the leaders in Turkey that they should immediately release the hundreds of judges still in solitary confinement and reinstate all 4,000 of their purged colleagues.

Aydin urged Spano “to decline the honorary doctorate even before stepping onto Turkish soil, conveying a very strong message to all parties before meeting with them in person. Otherwise, the good will exerted through Spano’s visit would not only be wasted, but serve as a trump card for the government and Erdogan, who will use the gesture as a sign of appraisal and legitimization of the illegalities taking place in the country under his rule.”

Regrettably, Spano ignored all the good advice provided by Turkish human rights activists and thus undermined his own reputation as well as that of the European Court of Human Rights!

A confrontation is brewing in rural Italy over who should get to determine the needs of the most marginalised among the approximately 550,000 foreigners – including 150,000 undocumented migrants – working in the country’s key agricultural sector.

Growing tensions between aid workers and union organisers in the Apulia region highlight the divide over whether poor living conditions in dozens of informal settlements across the country should be viewed as part of Italy’s so-called “migration emergency” or as the product of rampant labour exploitation in a highly profitable industry. 

On one side, aid workers and local officials say the informal settlements housing the migrant workers should be brought under institutional control. Dismal conditions in the settlements – where running water is often scarce and improvised electrical lines sometimes spark fires – have led to over 1,500 deaths since 2014, according to one estimate. 

“It is necessary to have a third sector entity to best organise and direct the daily life in these communities,” Roberto Venneri, head of the Apulia government department tasked with dealing with migrant settlements, told The New Humanitarian.

Union organisers, on the other hand, say the migrant workers don’t need aid; they need a long-term solution, and the approach advocated for by local officials and aid groups is not it. They argue that Italy needs to address racism and the exploitation of migrants in its agricultural sector, and provide an effective pathway for the undocumented to regularise their status.

An amnesty law passed in May to address economic and public health concerns stemming from the coronavirus pandemic paved the way for more than 207,000 people to apply for six-month residency permits, but only 15 percent of applications came from agricultural workers. 

The situation in Apulia boiled over mid-June when a group of aid workers set out on a routine visit to Torretta Antonacci, one of the largest informal settlements in Italy, also known as the Gran Ghetto.

The settlement is home to somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people depending on the season. Aid workers had been providing services there since the beginning of Italy’s coronavirus lockdown in March, but on this day found the road into the shanty town blocked by a picket line organised by a grassroots Italian labour union, the Unione Sindacale di Base, or USB.

Forced to retreat, the aid workers called on the police to take action against the union organisers, who they said instigated the protest.

A growing problem

Informal agricultural settlements have proliferated around Italy’s farmlands since at least the 1990s. But they have grown in number and size since migration to Italy across the Mediterranean spiked between 2014 and 2017.

Many who arrived during those years moved on to northern Europe. But others, particularly people from sub-Saharan Africa, stayed. Some ended up in legal limbo waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, or were stripped of humanitarian protections by security decrees passed in 2018. With little option but to work in the informal economy, many ended up in the settlements. 

There are eight settlements in Apulia alone, hosting between 400 and 2,000 people each, according to regional government estimates. Stereotyped as hotbeds of criminal activity, the biggest actually take the form of robust, small communities: There are restaurants, shops, even nightclubs in some, and migrants living in nearby cities visit on the weekends to spend time in places that feel removed from the stigmas often attached to African migrants in Italy, according to migrants interviewed by TNH.

To find work, many residents have to rely on the caporalato system, a 17-billion-euro-a-year industry of illegal employment. Working conditions and pay vary, but migrant labourers who spoke to TNH say they are often required to work for up to 12 hours and can earn as little as 30 euros per day. Italy has laws prohibiting the practices the caporalato system relies on, but they are routinely unenforced. 

In Apulia, the agricultural sector is estimated to be worth 3.6 billion euros, and it was assigned an additional 1.6 billion euros in farm subsidies and other agricultural funding from the EU between 2014 and 2020. 

Union organisers want some of that money to go towards improving the treatment or living conditions of the people working in the multi-billion-euro industry. 

“This place is a gold mine, but its profits don’t benefit us.”

Instead, help to improve the living conditions of agricultural workers comes from EU and Italian migration funds, and the Italian government leans on aid groups to oversee the projects it implements, according to Venneri, the Apulia government official.

“This place is a gold mine, but its profits don’t benefit us,” Aboubakar Soumahoro, a high-profile union organiser originally from Ivory Coast who has become a national symbol of the resistance to these policies, told TNH in 2017. “Subsidies [to farmers] should at least be tied to the respect of employment contracts… They want to force us into the dependency industry, where money goes to enrich aid cooperatives and not to benefit us.”

‘Troublemakers’ in the ghetto

Last December, a fire ripped through Torretta Antonacci, burning many makeshift shelters to the ground. In its wake, regional authorities installed 106 shipping containers as emergency housing, and issued a call for aid groups to use a new large tent they had pitched in the settlement for humanitarian projects.

“To this call, we responded: ‘we are in’,” Domenico La Marca, director of Baobab Experience, an Italian NGO, told TNH. 

Baobab Experience has been providing legal advice and help accessing healthcare to migrants in the nearby town of Foggia for more than 10 years. La Marca saw the opening of a humanitarian centre in Torretta Antonacci as an opportunity to expand the group’s activities in a location where they were sorely needed.

Baobab Experience was joined by the local chapter of the Catholic charity Caritas and a labour union called FLAI-CGIL, which advocates for the removal of informal settlements and the provision of alternative housing. 

The three groups started making weekly trips to Torretta Antonacci to teach Italian classes, provide legal and health assistance, and run leisure activities like football matches or games of draughts (checkers).

“Since our first visit – when 30 people signed up for our Italian classes – I was approached by some people tied to USB,” La Marca said. “They told me very clearly that they are not children, that they didn’t need us, and they invited us to collect our toys… and go away.”

La Marca said tensions escalated week by week until the picket line in June, and claimed the USB organisers were pressuring people to participate. “[They] were inciting these poor boys, who didn’t believe, themselves, in what they were doing, screaming ‘libertà’ [‘freedom’]. Some couldn’t even pronounce it properly,” he said.

‘We are all equals here’

In July, when TNH visited Torretta Antonacci, a police car was parked at the far end of the dirt road leading to the settlement, “a form of long-distance policing, to ensure the safety of aid workers,” the officers said.

Workers were returning from the fields, and the shops, grocery stores, and informal night clubs in the makeshift part of the encampment that survived the fire were busy with clients. One of the containers in the new section was draped in USB flags.

“Why do they have to keep coming when we no longer need help? We are all grown-ups here; people who work hard to take care of their families.”

Inside, Sambaré, a USB organiser who is originally from Mali, was blunt. “We organised a roadblock, and we stand by what we did,” he said. “When Caritas brought us food during the coronavirus [lockdown], we were grateful for that. But why do they have to keep coming when we no longer need help? We are all grown-ups here; people who work hard to take care of their families.”

When local authorities installed the containers, union organisers initially celebrated it as a victory, or at least as an acceptance of their right to stay – in the past, the regional government had taken an antagonistic stance towards the settlement, even bulldozing it in 2017.

But now Sambaré fears the installation of the containers, and the aid projects that came along with them, might be the first step towards turning the informal settlement into a government-administered camp. 

When this has happened elsewhere, local authorities have hired private security companies to control access to the sites by checking residency documents, which forces people without legal status out. Government control also means aid groups provide food and other supplies, which can choke off the informal economy, an important source of income for inhabitants. 

“This space needs to remain self-managed,” Sambaré said. “We won’t accept any distinction based on who has documents and who doesn’t. We are all equals here.”

But local officials and aid groups reject the idea. “We are not looking for police control… [but] it is unthinkable to go down a path of self-management,” Venneri said, adding that it’s essential for aid groups to manage the settlements, and that EU funding isn’t used to host undocumented people, who he referred to as illegals.

After the bulldozing of Torretta Antonacci in 2017, most residents refused to move into government-sponsored housing because they didn’t want to give up their personal autonomy. “I also would like to live comfortably, to take a hot shower, but at least here nobody rules over you,” Galoume Madourie, a long-term resident of Torretta Antonacci, told TNH at the time.

‘The will to speak for themselves’

For now, the aid groups have resumed their weekly visits to Torretta Antonacci. And as long as the response to the living conditions in the informal settlements is being viewed by officials – and funded – as part of the migration crisis, their approach will likely win out. 

But Soumahoro isn’t backing down. After resigning from the USB in July, he launched a new union, the “Lega dei Braccianti”, specifically focused on organising agricultural labourers. 

The group is headquartered in another shanty town in Apulia, and organisers like Sambaré have followed Soumahoro into it. They are aiming to build a coalition to push for an immigration amnesty that will benefit agricultural workers and address the marginalisation of migrants, not through aid but through structural change. 

When Soumahoro announced his new initiative, he stressed the importance of self-representation. The struggle for the rights of the invisible, he wrote, “must be accompanied by the will to take the floor and speak for themselves”.

lda/er/ag