After MSF rescue mission: Ten years in prison for a refugee who allegedly piloted the boat

Ten years in prison for driving a boat.

This is the future that a judge in Messina has decided for “Lamin”, a young Gambian man accused of driving a migrant boat. Not only is it scandalous that anyone should be put in prison for simply driving a boat, but Lamin says that it wasn’t even him!

Lamin arrived in Messina, Sicily, in November 2021 on board of MSF's ship Geo Barents, along with 186 other people and the bodies of 10 people who had suffocated to death.

Those deaths are a direct result of Europe’s racist policies of border closure. Lamin could very easily have been one of them. But the authorities also want someone to blame for the deaths, to distract attention away from the responsability of authorities and governments for the endless death at sea. Nevertheless, the prosecution failed to prove that the deaths were the fault of whoever drove the boat: the court found Lamin not guilty of the accusation of multiple counts of murder.

Despite this, he has been sentenced to ten years in prison “only” for the crime of facilitating unauthorized immigration. The judge applied all of the aggravating additional articles, but also a reduction of the jail time for ‘attenuating circumstances’.

Ten years, however, is an extremely high sentence for this crime, even by Italian standards! We only know of one sentence that exceeds this (issued last year to two Turkish men in Calabria, who are appealining it).

We cannot help but wonder whether the harsh sentencing of Lamin is partly due to the poisonous words of the current right-wing government, who have attempted to transform the shipwreck at Cutro into an excuse to further criminalize boat drivers, including the introduction of harsher prison sentences and the new crime of “causing death or lesions due to facilitating illegal immigration” – a crime which now carries a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.

We are not giving up. We have been in touch with Lamin since he arrived in Italy, thanks to his lawyer and to the activists in Palermo who have been writing to him and other prisoners across the country. We have read his words, his thoughts, his feelings. Little by little, those prison walls can be broken down. And we will keep writing with Lamin, and challenging the injustice of those walls that separate him from the world, until he is free.

The case will go to appeal by the end of the year. See you in court, and in the streets.