The judge of the Catania court Iolanda Apostolico - who has ended up at the center of political controversy in recent days - has decided not to validate the detentions in the Pozzallo CPR ordered by the Ragusa police commissioner against four Tunisian migrants.
It is the second provision in this sense by the magistrate, who came to the fore also for the publication of a video in which she was filmed while, in August 2018, protesting against the decision of the then Interior Minister Salvini not to allow people to disembark in I bring 150 refugees.
«The applicant - writes Apostolico in one of the 4 provisions in which he denies the validation of detention - cannot be detained for the sole purpose of examining his application and, as already stated by previous decisions of this court, the detention of an applicant for international protection for European directives, constituting a measure of deprivation of personal liberty, it can legitimately be implemented only in the presence of the justifying conditions provided for by law".
The judge also reiterates, as already written in other orders, that the status of asylum seeker is assumed with the expression of the desire to invoke protection and in the 4 cases dealt with this desire was already expressed in Lampedusa.
In Pozzallo, in fact, the Tunisian refugees limited themselves to reiterating what was requested on the island upon their arrival: therefore by law the so-called border procedure cannot be applied to them and therefore the detention ceases.
Finally, the judge notes that the rule of the so-called Cutro decree which provides for the payment of a sum as a guarantee as a means to avoid detention is "incompatible with the 2013 EU directive" as interpreted by the jurisprudence according to which "detention can take place only where necessary, on the basis of a case-by-case assessment, unless less coercive alternative measures are not effectively applicable".
Finally, Apostolico cites a 2020 Court of Justice ruling according to which EU rules "must be interpreted in the sense that they preclude, first of all, an applicant for international protection being detained for the sole reason that he cannot meet his own needs".
(Unioneonline/lf)
