Italy’s fight against Human Rights will come back to bite
By: Laura Loguercio
Tags: Politics, Italy, Salvini, Migration, Refugees

First things first, it’s useful to clarify what we mean by “humanitarian protection”.

Humanitarian protection is one of the three forms of protection a migrant can receive from a foreign State, together with the status of refugee and the subsidiary protection.

The refugee status was introduced in 1951 with the Refugee Convention of Genève and it’s still regulated by Treaty hence signed. A refugee, according to the Convention, is someone who is “unable or unwilling to return to his/her country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”. The 147 countries that ratified the Refugee Convention are obliged to protect refugees that are on their territory providing them with free access to courts, administrative assistance, travel documents, working permits and to help them integrate in the host country.

Not all the asylum seekers are granted the refugee status. The subsidiary protection is therefore a second kind of protection regulated by the European Union. It was established in 2004 and revised in 2011. According to EU Directive 2011/95 a “person eligible for subsidiary protection” is “a third- country national or a stateless person who does not qualify as a refugee but in respect of whom substantial grounds have been shown for believing that the person concerned, if returned to his or her country of origin, or in the case of a stateless person, to his or her country of former habitual residence, would face a real risk of suffering serious harm”, where “serious harm” is described as the risk of: death penalty or execution; torture or degrading treatment; serious and individual threat to a civilian’s life in situations of international or internal arm conflict.

The refugee status and the subsidiary protection are regulated by international treaties with binding force which have been ratified by Italy. Therefore, in this moment, the national yellow-green government can’t do anything to change them without incurring in serious consequences.

On the other hand, the humanitarian protection consists of a special residence permit granted by national governments to foreign people who do not meet the standard requirements for the residence permit or for the refugee status/subsidiary protection, but nonetheless have serious humanitarian reasons for wanting to leave their country. In Italy, this kind of protection exists since 1998 (LD 286/98, Article 5 par. 6) and has been widely used during the last years in response to the increase in migratory flows.

In 2017 Italy received 130.000 asylum applications: 52% of them were rejected, 25% obtained the humanitarian protection (that amounts to 35.000 people!) a mere 8,4% received the refugee status and another 8,4% the subsidiary protection.

With the new Security and Immigration Decree, the Italian government will stop granting residence permits on humanitarian grounds. Furthermore, the permits issued in 2017–2018 won’t be valid anymore, meaning that all the people that obtained this kind of protection during the last two years will now receive an order of expulsion, thus becoming illegal immigrants with no rights whatsoever.