One of the difficulties in discussing the issue of migrant boat drivers has been the lack of easily accessible data relating to the total number of arrests, the number of people imprisoned and how many people are still in prison. Unfortunately these data sets – which would make it possible to describe the past situation in detail and compare it with the current one – have not been made public. In the research for this report we have used two methodologies: a quantitative approach that consists in verifying and aggregating the fragmentary data available from official sources (for the most part, from the Italian polizia di Stato), and on the other hand a qualitative approach, through extracting information based on articles published in the Italian press.
Data from the police and military
The first data groups to analyze are the official numbers from the annual reports of the Italian police, available for the years 2013–2020. From these we can gather that 200 “boat drivers, organizers and assistants” were arrested in 2013; 503 “boat drivers and assistants” in 2014; 517 in 2015; 770 in 2016; 33 in 2017; 173 in 2018; 100 in 2019; 121 in 2020. (With data released by the Ministry of the Interior in August 2021, we know that there have been at least a further 44 arrests this year). The sum total of arrests for the last 8 years is therefore 2,559 arrests, represented by the graphic below.
According to a Ministerial report, 728 boat drivers were arrested over the period of the operation Mare Nostrum (October 2013 – October 2014) meaning that the period October–December 2013 had a maximum of 224 arrests: we have used this figure instead of the ‘200’ published in the police data. It should be noted, furthermore, that the numbers relate to “boat drivers and assistants”, without specifying whether this only involved arrivals by sea or arrests in relation to people already present in Italy.
We can compare these numbers from the police statistics with those of arrivals according to each year, in order to arrive at a percentage of arrests, i.e. how many arrests for every 100 migrants who land. This varies between 0.3% and 0.9%, i.e. almost one in a hundred for the years 2018 and 2019. The percentages are summarized in the graphic below:
A data survey covering 600 cases up to October 2017 (carried out by the European Observatory on Migrant Smuggling and Human Trafficking, a Frontex project) describes only 28 concluded criminal proceedings, of which 13 concluded in definitive sentences. Another 100 cases examined by the Observatory at the end of the year 2018 describe 151 new arrests, of whom 20 people were under trial. A third report was promised for July 2020 but has apparently still not been published: probably due to an internal reorganization and the closure of the project. The imprecision of this data is in itself noteworthy, given that these figures on trials have only been published in a Libyan context about the trafficking and smuggling of persons: it is not clear whether the figures are indeed only about arrivals from Libya, nor how many of those found guilty proposed a defense of the ‘state of necessity’.
We can then analyze the numbers published by the Italian customs police, but these are even less clear than those of the state police. They report 33 migrant boat drivers arrested in 2016, 751 ‘boat drivers and drug dealers’ arrested in 2017; 68 boat drivers in 2018, 46 persons “responsible” for migrant smuggling arrested in 2019, and 73 boat drivers in 2020. We have deemed these figures too generic to take into consideration for the current research.
Media reports
Since 2016, the NGO borderline-europe has monitored news items in the Italian press relating to the arrests of boat drivers: for the current report, we expanded and updated these lists. The articles available online for the years prior to 2017 do not provide statistically significant information about the cases, but from 2017 onward the number of arrests that can be counted in the media reports are constantly closer to the estimates of arrests published by the police. Specifically, in 2017 the police reported 331 arrests, while we can count 160 from media reports; in 2018 the police reported 173 arrests, and we can count 123 cited in press articles; in 2019 the police reported 100 arrests, and we can count 79 in the news; finally in 2020 the police reported 121 arrests, and we have counted 89 in the Italian press. These numbers are summarized in the chart below.
Through a review of articles in the Italian press over the first 6 months of the year 2021, we have counted 44 arrests of suspected boat drivers. This information – combined with what we have found out from interviews with lawyers, and data extrapolated from numerous court sentences – provides a more complete overview of what has happened over recent years. Indeed, out of the 2,515 arrests claimed by the police – including those relating to 2021 – we have found that 950 can be found trace of in the national press, i.e. a just over one third. We then studied these cases to discover the nationality of the arrestees, which represents the one factor which is reported with some consistency in media reports (around 85% of the articles reviewed). The countries or geographical zones of origin of the arrestees that can be extracted from the articles are represented in the chart below:
The chart shows the proportion of people arrested according to geographic origins for the period 2013–2021, according to our analysis of 950 cases. The break down is as follows: 35% from North Africa, 21% from Eastern Europe, 20% from West Africa and only in 2%–4% of cases was the arrestee from East Africa, from the Middle East or from Turkey. As we have already stated, for around 15% of the cases we have not managed to identify the geographical zone of origin of the arrestees.
From a projection of the most significant countries of origin (in numerical terms) of the arrestees, in relation to the number of arrests each year, we find a general decrease in the number of arrests between 2014 and 2021, with a counter-tendency that peaks in 2017; in 2020, furthermore, we can also infer the trend in relation both the routes and to the nationalities of the people who are arrested as boat drivers along these routes. Between 2014 and 2021, we note a general decrease in arrests of Egyptian citizens, due to the gradual abandoning of the Egyptian route, and at the same time an increasing use of boat drivers from West Africa along with Libyan route, above all Gambian and Senegalese migrants. We can also see here the increasing arrests of boat drivers from Ukraine from 2016 onward, who continue to represent a high proportion of arrestees. The same can be seen for Tunisian arrestees. Indeed, taken together, the arrests of Ukrainian and Tunisian citizens after 2017 (i.e. after the near-closure of the Libyan route) reflects an increase in landings from the non-Libyan routes.
In the above we have managed to provide an overview of the arrests of boat drivers and the make-up of the people arrested. This provides a basis on which to open much more, and much needed research. In the section on prison we will further confront some statistical problems in relation to the number of people who have been put on trial and imprisoned.
From Sea To Prison 