A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI - Umanita Nova: Freedom for Maysoon and Marjan. Two Iranian women prisoners of the Italian fascist government. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Anyone who has dealt with immigration in various capacities over the 
last twenty-five years has had to deal with dramatic, often tragic and - 
more than once - absolutely grotesque situations on many occasions. ---- 
After all, the entire mechanism of managing migratory flows, in Italy 
and Europe, is based on regulations and assumptions that are beyond any 
logic as well as any sense of humanity. To be honest, if those who 
conceive and enforce the laws do not know where humanity lives, even a 
modicum of common sense would be enough to improve rules that are as 
absurd as they are aberrant. However, we are quite aware that in the 
institutions, and among those who govern us, common sense is truly a 
rare commodity.

The latest immigration story, dramatic and Kafkaesque at the same time, 
takes us straight to Calabria but begins in Iran.

Following the very strong protests of Iranian youth - and especially 
women - that inflamed the country between the end of 2022 and 2023, the 
repressive response of the Tehran regime was very harsh: thousands of 
arrests, killings, arbitrary detentions, summary executions and death 
sentences.

Among the thousands of women who courageously challenged the 
obscurantist and misogynist policies of the Iranian theocracy there was 
also Maysoon Majidi, 28 years old, Kurdish, director and actress very 
committed to the defense and promotion of human rights, for the freedom 
and self-determination of women. At a certain point for Maysoon life in 
Iran had become impossible and so, after being fired from the university 
where she worked, she decided to leave the country. A story damned 
similar to so many others, which led her - on New Year's Eve 2023 - to 
land on the Calabrian coast. The idea is to ask for protection by virtue 
of her status as a political persecuted person in her homeland, but the 
Italian Republic has a very different treatment in store for her. 
Maysoon is taken to prison, in Castrovillari, where she remains for six 
months. The accusation is that of being a smuggler. A person, that is, 
who actively works to organize and carry out the irregular entry of 
immigrants within our borders. The ones who accused her were two 
companions who, shortly after, retracted everything, explaining to 
Maysoon's lawyer that they had been completely misunderstood by the 
Italian authorities who had collected their statements, claiming that 
their statements were full of errors due to a bad translation.

Now Maysoon Majidi is in the prison of Reggio Calabria where she was 
transferred on July 5. The charge on which she is being held is aiding 
and abetting irregular immigration pursuant to art. 12 of the 
Consolidated Law on Immigration. An accusation that blocks the road to 
obtaining humanitarian protection. But we will return to this shortly.

Another Iranian woman, Marjan Jamali, is in a similar situation. She 
arrived in Italy last year on a sailing boat with about a hundred other 
people. Marjan had fled Iran, along with her seven-year-old son, to 
escape government repression and beatings from her partner. She too was 
defamatoryly accused of being a trafficker, brought by three men - who 
later disappeared - who were on the same boat and who, according to 
Marjan herself, had tried to abuse her without success. Needless to say, 
the testimonies of the other migrants, which cleared her of any 
operational role in the crossing to Italy, were not taken into 
consideration. While Marjan is still awaiting trial and is a guest, by 
order of the judge, at a reception facility together with her son, the 
court in Crotone has just denied Maysoon house arrest, in the second 
hearing, after nine months of unjust imprisonment. Now he weighs forty 
kilos and his conditions are becoming increasingly worrying, even from a 
psychological point of view.

The two stories, completely similar, are united by this hypothesis of 
crime provided for by article 12 of the Consolidated Law on Immigration 
(remember the Turco-Napolitano law of 1998?) in which anyone who 
"promotes, directs, organizes, finances or carries out the transport of 
foreigners into the territory of the State or carries out other acts 
aimed at illegally procuring their entry into the territory of the 
State" is punished.

Italian legislation differs from international legislation on an element 
that, when speaking of human trafficking, should be decisive: profit.

In the United Nations Protocol adopted in 2000 (and ratified by Italy), 
migrant trafficking is defined in Article 3 as "the procuring - in order 
to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or material advantage - 
the irregular entry of a person into a State of which the person is not 
a citizen or permanent resident". This completely self-evident concept 
is also reiterated in Article 6, and serves precisely to protect not 
only the victims of human trafficking but also to clearly distinguish 
those who help people in difficulty from those who, instead, organize 
routes and movements for profit.

There is no trace of this necessary distinction in Italian law, and this 
explains the absurdity of these and many other stories.

The repressive fury that these two Iranian women are enduring is the 
result not only of a deeply unjust and mistaken law, but also of the 
political climate fueled by this unpresentable government that in the 
aftermath of the Cutro massacre declared war on smugglers "across the 
globe". This promise, full of that caricatured rhetoric of which Giorgia 
Meloni is particularly capable, hid the precise will to unload onto the 
last link in the chain all the political responsibilities that are at 
the root of the tragedies linked to migration, in Italy and beyond, and 
that must be sought in very different contexts.

As reiterated for years and in every way by anti-racist movements 
"across the globe", it is the borders and the liberticidal laws that 
kill people by not allowing them to move freely through safe and regular 
channels, without having to resort to criminals, mafiosi, border guards 
and smugglers.

The laws that seek to "regulate" immigration are deliberately absurd 
because they serve to create "illegal immigrants", to force them to die 
in the attempt to change their lives, to criminalize them in every way 
when they set foot here.

The repression of migrants, which is a constitutive fact of state 
policies, has an even more hateful flavor when it gives rise to 
incredible events such as those we have recounted. In a historical 
moment in which, with enormous sacrifices, gender issues are beginning 
to emerge in an increasingly effective manner in the international 
public and political debate, the treatment that the Italian authorities 
are reserving for the Iranians Maysoon Majidi and Marjan Jalali is truly 
indefensible and reveals, once again, the violent and reactionary nature 
of this government.

TAZ laboratory of libertarian communication

https://umanitanova.org/liberta-per-maysoon-e-marjan-due-donne-iraniane-prigioniere-del-governo-fascista-italiano/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en