Aftermath of airstrike in Balbek. Photo: Al Akhbar
November marked an increase in Israeli airstrikes on different parts of Syria, foreshadowing a serious escalation in a third front in the region in addition to Gaza and Lebanon.
Israeli warplanes intensified their deadly attacks on different parts of the Syrian capital Damascus, and the Southern Suburb (Dahiyeh) in the Lebanese capital Beirut on Thursday, November 14.
The aerial attacks on Damascus targeted residential buildings in both Mazzeh and Qudsaya areas, leaving at least 15 people killed and 16 others injured, in addition to causing significant material damage to a number of buildings, according to a source in the Syrian military.
Thursday’s airstrikes on Damascus were preceded by a series of airstrikes that targeted different parts of Syria within the last couple of weeks. On Wednesday, November 13, Israeli fighter jets struck bridges on the Orontes River and roads in Al-Qusayr area in Homs countryside, near the Syrian Lebanese borders. The airstrikes inflicted great damage on the bridges and roads, which consequently became out of service, as per a report published by the Syrian Arab News Agency SANA.
On Sunday, November 10, Israeli warplanes targeted a residential building in the Sayyidah Zaynab area of Damascus, killing seven civilians including women and children. Previous airstrikes were launched by Israeli fighter jets on November 4, targeting a number of sites south of Damascus, resulting in material damages.
Syria’s Foreign and Expatriates Ministry condemned the Israeli attacks in a statement issued on Thursday. “The Israeli entity’s continuation of its attacks on Syria today comes only two days after the joint Arab-Islamic summit in Riyadh issued a broad condemnation of its brutal and escalating aggression on Syrian territory, and its warning of the danger of this escalation that is ravaging the region and its regional and international repercussions,” the Ministry stated.
“Syria affirms that the usurping entity’s continued disregard for international laws and regulations, and its indifference to all international demands to stop its aggression and violations, comes as a result of the Security Council’s failure to take a firm and real stance to deter it from its crimes, which also included attacks on international peacekeeping forces in Lebanon,” the Ministry added.
Meanwhile, Israel carried out at least four rounds of air raids on different targets across Beirut’s Southern Suburb (Dahiyeh), including Al-Amrousiyeh area near Beirut’s International Airport. Moreover, the Israeli aggression continued to target different areas of South Lebanon and Beqaa. The attacks across Lebanon on Thursday left at least 11 people killed and several others wounded, according to media reports.
The escalation of Israeli aggression and its expansion on different fronts has been increasing despite the mounting regional and international calls for a ceasefire and de-escalation, which indicates Israel’s total disregard of international law and its obligations. Israel insists on committing blatant violations of territorial integrity of sovereign states, due to the impunity it enjoys, and being given the greenlight by the United States.
Left activists in the country blame the government’s reluctance to act against big polluters despite its impact on the most of the people who are risking their health to pursue their livelihoods.
A thick layer of toxic smog has covered the atmosphere of Pakistan’s Punjab province for the last two weeks, making its air hazardous for millions of people in cities such as Lahore and Multan.
Lahore, the capital of Punjab and the second largest city of Pakistan has emerged as the world’s most polluted city with its AQI hitting above 1,000 for several days this week. The AQI on Wednesday was recorded at 815. Other cities in the Punjab province, such as Multan, Bahawalpur and Faisalabad too recorded an average AQI above 400 in the same period.
An AQI above 300 is considered hazardous for human living.
The high level of pollutants (PM 2.5) in the air has forced the Pakistani authorities to shut down schools and colleges until November 17 and public parks until November 18. It has also issued orders to shut the shops and commercial activities early asking citizens to minimize venturing out and to wear masks.
The number of people reporting respiratory issues have reached nearly 70,000 daily in the province according to theAssociated Press.
Prolonged exposure to smog leads to a large number of health problems such as irritation in the eyes, respiratory issues among others. Every year millions of people die due to air pollution.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) “fine particles matter (PM 2.5) can penetrate [the human body] through the lungs” and blood streams causing major damages to human organs and can cause lung cancer, asthma, stroke and other diseases. Such exposure among children can affect their growth both physically and psychologically and can have lifelong effects.
Smog has become a regular feature in Pakistan’s Punjab province in recent years due to rising pollution caused by the high number of vehicles, increasing urbanization with a high density population, and an increase in polluting industries and agricultural activities.
According to Marriyum Aurangzeb, a senior minister in the Punjab government, Lahore endured 275 days of unhealthy AQI levels over the past one year with average temperature rising by 2.3 degree celsius.
Failure of the state
Punjab is Pakistan’s largest province with over 117 million people. The government led by Mariyum Nawaz of Pakistan Muslim League (PML) has been accused of taking inadequate measures to control the situation. In the name of fighting against polluters it has only targeted farmers and brick kilns and has been reluctant to hold larger and more powerful polluters such as big industries and the transport sector, Dawn reported.
According to the Punjab government’s own study, unfit vehicles apparently are the primary polluters (around 43%) in the province but the government has failed to curb their movement.
Ammar Ali Jan, head of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) has been consistently raising the issue of smog which makes the atmosphere “unfit for human survival.” Noting that in this inhuman condition only the rich who can afford to buy air purifiers can survive terming the government’s inactivity to provide relief to the people as a “criminal and insane” policy of “privatization of clean air.”
High pollution disrupts normal life for all sections of the population. However, it disproportionately affects the working class population as they are unable to follow the protection measures such as staying at home and wearing masks given the nature of their livelihoods.
In a recent tweet he also said that “climate catastrophe in Punjab is a result of a development model that turned our cities into concrete jungles.” He accused the Maryum Nawaz government for remaining “hopelessly non serious about confronting the challenge” and instead favoring big polluters such as “land mafia,” and “car/oil companies” in the state.
In light of the government’s lack of response, various left and progressive student organizations in the country called for a protest in front of the Punjab provincial assembly on Thursday, November 14. They demanded urgent action to fight climate change and the smog problem in the country.
Activists protesting against fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance at COP29 hold a demonstration on November 15, 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
“It is now clear that the COP is no longer fit for purpose,” a coalition of scientists and advocates wrote as more than 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists swarmed COP29 in Azerbaijan.
The crushing influence of petrostates and fossil fuel industry lobbyists has rendered the annual United Nations climate conference unfit to deliver the kinds of sweeping changes needed to avert catastrophic warming, a coalition of leading scientists, advocates, and policy experts warned in an open letter released Friday as the first week of the COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan came to a close.
Acknowledging that the COP process has achieved “important diplomatic milestones” and “a remarkable consensus” on climate targets over nearly three decades of international negotiations, the coalition wrote that the policy framework produced by dozens of U.N. summits is not sufficient to solve the pressing crises facing humanity in an age of runaway warming and large-scale climate devastation.
“Science tells us that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 7.5% annually to have any chance of staying within the 1.5°C threshold, a prerequisite for the stability of our planet and a livable future for much of humanity. In 2024, the task is unequivocal: Global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 4 billion tonnes,” reads the letter, whose signatories include former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Christiana Figueres, Club of Rome global ambassador Sandrine Dixson-Declève, and Potsdam Institute for Climate Action Research director Johan Rockström.
“Twenty-eight COPs have delivered us with the policy framework to achieve this, but it is now clear that the COP is no longer fit for purpose,” the letter continues. “Its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.”
The letter calls not for a complete abandonment of COP but rather “a fundamental overhaul” that would enable the U.N.-led summit “to deliver on agreed commitments and ensure the urgent energy transition and phase-out of fossil energy.”
The coalition of experts and advocates recommended a number of reforms for future COP summits, including “strict eligibility criteria to exclude countries who do not support the phase-out/transition away from fossil energy,” new “mechanisms to hold countries accountable for their climate targets and commitments,” and changes to limit the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists and ensure equitable representation.
“At the last COP, fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered representatives of scientific institutions, Indigenous communities, and vulnerable nations,” Figueres said in a statement Friday. “We cannot hope to achieve a just transition without significant reforms to the COP process that ensure fair representation of those most affected.”
Rockström added that “there is still a window of opportunity for a safe landing for humanity, but this requires a global climate policy process that can deliver change at exponential speed and scale.”
“Planet Earth is in critical condition,” he said. “We have already crossed six planetary boundaries.”
“2024 marks yet another year at COP where we see those fighting the climate crisis outnumbered by those that have contributed to it the most—the fossil fuel industry.”
The open letter was released in the wake of a new analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition showing that at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the COP29 summit—giving the industry primarily responsible for the global climate emergency more representation than nearly every country present at the talks in Baku.
According to the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition, the fossil fuel industry has more representation at COP29 than the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.
Additionally, The Guardian reported Friday that “at least 132 oil and gas company bosses and staff were invited” to COP29 as “guests” by Azerbaijan’s government and “given host country badges.”
“2024 marks yet another year at COP where we see those fighting the climate crisis outnumbered by those that have contributed to it the most—the fossil fuel industry,” said Joseph Sikulu of 350.org. “How can we achieve the ambition that is needed to save our homes when these negotiations are continually flooded with fossil fuel lobbyists? There is a ban on tobacco lobbyists from attending the World Health Organization’s summit, why is that not the case for the fossil fuel industry at COP?”
“We demand that the upcoming COP presidencies set clear rules against the presence of fossil fuel interests at the negotiating table,” Sikulu added. “Our lives depend on it.”
Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, joined climate advocates on Friday in decrying Big Oil’s capture of the U.N. climate summit.
“It’s unfortunate that the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree,” said Gore.
Lamenting that the follow-through on COP28 commitments to transition away from fossil fuels has been “very weak,” Gore said he believes “one of the reasons for that is that the petrostates have too much control over the process.”
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Scientists and campaigners are calling on governments and tech companies to tackle climate disinformation. Credit: MauriceNorbert via Alamy
An open letter from climate scientists and campaigners warns of the dangers associated with false climate claims.
Governments around the world must take “immediate and decisive action” to tackle climate disinformation, scientists and campaign groups have urged as talks at the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan enter their fourth day.
A coalition of 55 climate information integrity groups and 42 leading climate scientists and experts have signed an open letter urging countries to counter the risk of false and misleading claims that are wrecking efforts to slow climate change.
It comes two days after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke at COP29 arguing that “there is no national security without climate security” – and a week after the election in the United States of Donald Trump, who has previously called climate change a “hoax”.
The letter published today – signatories to which include Friends of the Earth, the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, and regional branches of Greenpeace and WWF – lists steps governments could take.
These include adopting a universal definition of climate disinformation, such as the working definition proposed by the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition, another signatory.
According to the letter, the definition should cover anything that misrepresents scientific data or “falsely publicises” supposed solutions to climate change which in fact contribute to global warming, often referred to as “greenwashing”.
Such a definition should cover “deceptive or misleading online behaviour” that undermines public understanding of climate change, the fact it is caused by human activity, and the need for urgent mitigation and adaptation action, the letter said.
Signatories also urged governments to take action against organisations which give a platform to climate disinformation – including social media outlets, advertising technology providers, broadcasters, and publishing companies.
“The spread of disinformation continues to undermine and delay our collective ability to act, jeopardising progress at crucial negotiations and the upcoming G20 Summit in Brazil”, the letter said.
“Climate disinformation, waged by vested interests, undermines climate action and puts our collective future at risk. Our information ecosystem is being damaged, and those responsible must be held accountable.”
The letter ends by arguing that “by adopting these principles, governments can foster a healthier and safer online environment that supports informed decision-making and enables effective climate action.”
The world’s leading climate science group, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has warned that efforts to tackle climate change were being delayed by “rhetoric and misinformation that undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency”.
“As disinformation continues to be an obstacle to vital climate action, the message from this open letter to decision makers globally is clear: protecting truth in the climate conversation is critical if we are to secure meaningful change”, said Max MacBride, Head of Counter-Disinformation at Roots Greenpeace, the NGO’s grassroots campaign initiative.
“At Roots, we see every day how climate disinformation stifles youth advocacy, and we join this call to hold governments and platforms accountable for enabling informed, equitable climate action”, he said.
Climate Disinformation Threats
A CAAD report published earlier this week found that climate disinformation is widespread online, and is hobbling efforts to address climate change.
The report said that social media platforms bear responsibility for allowing “super spreaders” to “pollute their platforms with debunked claims attacking renewable energy and electric vehicles”.
CAAD also found that fossil fuel companies were allowed to use digital advertising across Meta platforms to greenwash their reputations, by promoting false solutions or presenting fossil fuels as essential to the energy transition.
A study published in February found that 14 percent of Americans don’t believe climate change is real – even as growing numbers of Americans say they are concerned about the climate.
“In the US, we’ve painfully experienced the role disinformation has played in thwarting disaster response and threats to the lives of responders”, Kate Cell, Senior Climate Campaign Manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told DeSmog.
“As climate-fueled disasters become more common around the world, governments can protect their residents by addressing the problem of climate disinformation systemically.”
Another report released this week by the scrutiny NGO InfluenceMap found 2.500 cases of fossil fuel companies pushing arguments which contradict IPCC recommendations since COP28 last year.
Thais Lazzeri, founder of educational group FALA, a signatory to the letter, told DeSmog: “The letter comes at a unique time for Brazil, which is hosting the G20 and the incoming COP30 Presidency. The alliance of so many Brazilian institutes and professionals shows the urgency for answers and the intersectoral power of this Brazilian network, willing to work together.”
She added: “At the opening of the Brazil space at CO29, Environment Minister, Marina Silva, said that denialism doesn’t fit. The Brazilian government can lead by example and guarantee information integrity policies and strategic, connected actions to change the game.”
DeSmog has previously reported on news media spreading false climate claims, with The Telegraph newspaper in the UK attacking climate solutions – a trend that has increasing since July’s general election. As revealed by DeSmog in 2023, one in three presenters on the right-wing broadcaster GB News had spread climate disinformation during the previous year.
“It is much easier to pollute the waters of public discussion on climate change causes and consequences than it is to keep them clean and productive,” said Max Boykoff, signatory to the letter and professor of Environmental Studies at Boulder University in Colorado and founder of the Media Climate Change Observatory, a project which analyses mentions of climate change in news media.
“Therefore, more proactive, clear, accurate and effective communication efforts are consistently and repeatedly needed. That motivates this call for government action to curb disinformation about climate change.”
Police wait for migrants to disembark in the port of Catania, Italy, 2023 | Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images. All rights reserved
Deploying ‘anti-mafia’ tactics against migrants and those standing in solidarity with them is solving nothing
In November 2023, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, gathered the country’s top prosecutors at the headquarters of the powerful anti-mafia and anti-terrorism directorate, the DNAA. The far-right leader flattered them, boasting about the Italian judiciary’s global prestige.
“Italy used to export mafia,” she said. “Now it exports anti-mafia.”
She was trying to smooth over tensions around her government’s plans to limit the powers of organised crime investigators. Yet there was more to Meloni’s statement than she perhaps realised.
Over the past decade, the DNAA shifted focus from fighting Italy’s mafia to tackling undocumented migration. The directorate became central to Europe’s response – a hub for national police forces and European agencies like Frontex and Europol to exchange and refine anti-migration tactics.
The DNAA’s success lay in its apparent ability to throw investigative findings behind an idea that politicians were keen to believe: that undocumented migration is essentially a matter of organised crime and should be dealt with as such. A prosecutor in Palermo branded this approach “the Italian job” – but Italy wasn’t alone in this effort.
In recent years, many European border countries have seen an explosion of court cases against people thought to facilitate migration in some way. Driving a dinghy, providing shelter or medical assistance, even receiving a distress call from a sinking boat is now enough to make someone vulnerable to prosecution.
Migrants, as always, have been the main targets. But prosecutors have also set their sights on European activists and aid workers in what can be described as a campaign to criminalise solidarity.
Since 2013 this judicial policy has been turbocharged with unprecedented funding, but its roots stretch back over two decades. The technical and legal groundwork was laid after the fall of the Soviet Union and reinforced following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States – an inflection point that saw migration become ever more intertwined with security concerns.
The policy has run long enough to be assessed. And, at least at the practical level, it has been a complete failure.
Searching for a mafia to take down
Critical smuggling scholars agree that large, hierarchical smuggling rings are rare. Their contribution to migration flows is insignificant. The vast majority of migration facilitation instead comes from loose chains of actors who do not share a common employer. A migrant finds somebody who can help with a step or two, and then finds someone new to help with the next step, building out this ‘chain’ as they go along.
European prosecutors ignore these inconvenient truths about migration, but that doesn’t change the result. Smuggling ‘kingpins’ are not ending up in the dock, and the people who do are rarely worth the judge’s time.
European governments used to conceal these deals, with investigative journalists scrambling to dig them up. But they are now official policy
The failure of this policy is not lost on its proponents. They are well aware of the reports that confirm these findings. So when it comes to reducing the number of undocumented arrivals, politicians resort to much cruder methods than the formalities of court procedures, such as so-called ‘border externalisation’ policies.
These are bilateral agreements between European states and various foreign entities in what Europe labels transit countries – governments, militias, autocratic rulers, law enforcement bodies, and security services. They typically include provisions for military equipment, technology, training, political support, and fat contracts for European and local companies and aid agencies.
In return, beneficiaries commit to intercepting, incarcerating, or taking back undesired migrants. European governments used to conceal these deals, with investigative journalists scrambling to dig them up. But they are now official policy, having shown some effectiveness in curbing migration flows, at least along specific routes and long enough to scrape through an election year.
So if the campaign against migration and solidarity offers, at best, a short-term dip in movement in some places but no real long term results, why is it pursued with such fervour? Authorities claim it’s about justice: smugglers exploit migrants in distress for profit and migrants infringe on a country’s sovereignty by entering without permission, both of which are morally unacceptable. They can’t just let that slide.
Campaigners take a different view: criminalisation, they argue, serves as a political tool to deflect blame from the real culprits of migrants’ suffering. “Tens of thousands have died at Europe’s borders over the last two decades,” says Sara Traylor, an activist in Palermo. “Policymakers push the false narrative that punishing facilitators of border crossings will solve this crisis. But these deaths stem directly from Europe’s closed doors and neo-colonial policies.”
Making a smuggler
Traylor co-authors “From Sea to Prison,” a report tracking the arrests of individuals accused of being “crew” on small dinghies arriving in Italy. Her group in Palermo is part of the broader European Captain Support network, a coalition of grassroots organisations providing information and legal support to those accused of maritime smuggling.
“Since 2013, nearly 3,000 people have been arrested in Italy alone,” she said. “Thousands more have faced similar fates in Greece and Spain. The UK and France have also stepped up prosecutions for those attempting to cross the Channel.”
The Captain Support network often highlights blatant miscarriages of justice. Their “Free the footballers” campaign seeks to exonerate eight asylum seekers from Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Morocco serving 30-year sentences in Italy. Included among them are professional football players. Arrested in 2015 and accused by the DNAA branch in Catania of steering a dinghy where 49 people suffocated, they were identified by witnesses who received residence permits for their cooperation. Initial testimonies had denied the presence of smugglers.
In court, it emerged that suspects were pre-selected based on their appearance on a military rescue boat. Frontex officers found them “suspicious” due to their clothes, and they had stood out to the Italian police on board “because of their lighter skin”. Witness statements collected by the police were nearly identical, with entire sections copied and pasted, and were largely retracted in court. Interpreters often didn’t speak the right languages.
Yet despite evidence that at least five were paying passengers, their sentences were upheld. A final ruling this April said only a presidential pardon could address the “disparity” between the sentence “and the moral dimension of their actual culpability”.
A volunteer rests as migrants disembark in Salerno, Italy in July 2023 | Ivan Romano/Getty Images. All rights reserved
According to Traylor, this case is not extreme: police interrogations after traumatic crossings, manipulated witness statements, lack of interpreters, inadequate legal defence, and the use of intimidation or inappropriate incentives to secure cooperation are recurrent in smuggling cases.
Traylor doesn’t claim that everyone helped by the Captain Support Network is innocent in a legal sense; a few may have acted for profit, but avoiding profit motives doesn’t prevent convictions. “Criminalised individuals come from diverse backgrounds and motivations,” she said. “The only common factor is that they’re accused of helping someone to cross a border.”
“The term ‘Captains’ restores agency to those on the move, who often don’t see smugglers as morally reprehensible,” she said. “Sometimes, boat drivers are even celebrated as heroes.”
The views Traylor holds today are considered fringe. They were once mainstream.
Shifting perceptions
In 1980, the highest criminal court in Germany heard a peculiar smuggling case. The smuggler was the plaintiff, and was referred to as an “escape helper”. He had sued a refugee for unpaid fees after a failed attempt to transport him from East to West Germany.
The court ruled the fees must be paid with interest, stating the refugee had made “use of his fundamental right to freedom of movement” and that helping someone exercise this right, even for profit, “does not in principle act contrary to morality.”
The court backed the Berlin Senate’s view that smuggling becomes criminal only when “capitalising on the personal distress of others” turns into “a permanent source of considerable income”.
Since then, the notion of what warrants criminal punishment has stretched to absurd extremes. It now includes everything from walking up to a border unaided to being related to someone crossing illegally, or even posting on social media about wanting to cross.
Refugees, once seen as freedom-seekers, have become ‘undesirable’ economic threats
In June 2022, 23 migrants were killed in clashes with Spanish and Moroccan security forces while trying to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Though the victims had reached the border on foot, Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish prime minister, blamed “human trafficking mafias” for the tragedy.
Later that year, Tunisian mothers protesting the mass drowning of migrants were met with a shocking response: Vincent Cochetel, a special envoy for the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), suggested “symbolically prosecuting parents for putting at risk their children.”
Just weeks ago, the Moroccan government, eager to appease Spain in externalisation talks, arrested 60 teenagers for social media posts about swimming to Ceuta, a Spanish town on the North African coast. They even placed barriers to prevent access to the sea in towns near the enclave.
This massive shift in perceptions is often traced to the post-Soviet era: refugees from the Eastern Bloc pouring into Western Europe, once seen as freedom-seekers, transformed into ‘undesirable’ economic threats. In this period European countries tightened asylum and visa laws, forcing refugees into illegal routes.
By the late 1990s, an influx of mostly Kurdish refugees from Iraq raised alarm in Germany, where politicians started to speak of “illegal immigration organised by criminal gangs” and pressured coastal states like Italy and Greece for tougher action against smugglers. Around the same time, Italy began prosecuting Kurds arriving by boat. And in the UK, a report from the late 1990s found that courts in coastal towns were seeing “two or three trials for facilitating illegal entry every week”, with sentences ranging from one to three years.
This process accelerated dramatically after the 11 September 2001 attacks. In Western political discourse, migrants became increasingly associated with security threats and terrorism. But political rhetoric alone doesn’t explain these changes.
In his seminal study of the subject, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, French sociologist Jef Huysmans argued that security agencies played a pivotal role in constructing migration as a criminal threat. Political visions, he noted, rely on “evoking fears and emergencies” while offering “credible methods” to control these insecurities. Security agencies then step in, using their expertise to provide competing solutions to the problems politicians present.
Italy’s DNAA proved to be a master in this game.
Power grab
On 3 October 2013, over 360 people, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, drowned off the coast of Lampedusa. Authorities ignored their overloaded boat for hours, until a passenger lit a makeshift torch that sparked a fire, capsizing the vessel.
Days later, in an official resolution, EU leaders declared that the tragedy “had shocked all Europeans”. To avoid more deaths, they pledged to “step up the fight against trafficking and smuggling.”
DNAA prosecutors were already at work to make that happen. The previous day they had met in Rome for the first in a series of “coordination meetings to fight maritime illegal immigration”. These meetings came to be attended by Frontex, Europol and Eurojust representatives alongside Italian law enforcement. The DNAA leveraged the credibility it had gained from decimating Cosa Nostra to assert its ability to tackle this new security threat.
That anti-mafia prosecutors could claim jurisdiction over undocumented migration, though, wasn’t a given. Before 2013, the DNAA’s remit was limited to trafficking, where people are forced across borders for exploitation, often through organised networks. Smuggling, however, involves voluntary crossings and is an offence against border laws, not people.
The Lampedusa disaster blurred this line: the journey was so deadly it seemed no one would take it willingly. With the public still emotional and desperate for solutions, the DNAA made the most of this confusion.
Handbooks said investigators should exploit the emotionally charged moments after a rescue, targeting the “weakest subjects” for statements against boat drivers
After the first meeting, the agency published guidelines expanding Italy’s jurisdiction into international waters for anti-smuggling operations. By invoking laws ranging from the slave trade era to the American war on drugs, they framed migration as part of a broader criminal continuum.
These guidelines referenced provisions of the 1958 Geneva Convention allowing high-seas police operations against the slave trade and piracy; the 2002 EU Facilitators Package that criminalises aiding undocumented entry and stay; and even the Reagan-era Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act.
Subsequent governments codified the DNAA’s expanded role. After the 2015 Paris attacks, the agency was granted the anti-terrorism mandate (“thanks to the work we did from 2013 on,” said Franco Roberti, then DNAA chief). Two years later it was assigned migrant smuggling.
With the jurisdictional groundwork in place, the DNAA moved on to securing arrests. Working with police and European navies, they formalised the investigative methods at work in the case of the Libyan football players.
Law enforcement handbooks advised identifying smugglers based on details like clothing and attitude toward the police. They also said investigators should exploit the emotionally charged moments after a rescue, targeting the “weakest subjects” for information and witness statements against boat drivers. Because civil rescue ships operated by NGOs interfered with this activity, in a 2017 coordination meeting attended by EU law enforcement the DNAA top brass discussed charging them with aiding and abetting smuggling.
The arrests made through these methods led to outlandish stories eagerly reported by the media: smugglers branding migrants’ heads with knives, boat drivers tossing a toddler overboard to hinder rescue efforts of their own sinking boat, and human rights activists making under-the-table deals with traffickers. Though debunked in court, these accounts made lasting impressions on the public. And because they targeted people arriving in Italy on dinghies, those arrested weren’t even smugglers or traffickers.
The only high-profile target of the DNAA was the alleged trafficking kingpin Medhanie Yedhego Mered, an Eritrean accused of organising numerous sea journeys from Libya. The investigation, a collaboration between the DNAA and the UK’s National Crime Agency, culminated in a dramatic press conference announcing Mered’s arrest in Sudan.
However, it soon emerged that the man flown to Palermo from Khartoum on a military jet was actually Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, a carpenter from Asmara. Prosecutors held him in prison for three years before partly admitting the mistake.
Calogero Ferrara, the DNAA prosecutor behind the case and the proponent of the “Italian job” approach, responded by wiretapping Guardian journalist Lorenzo Tondo, who exposed the error, and later sued him for libel. He recently called to strengthen international legislation against migrant smuggling.
In a 2022 interview, even Franco Roberti, the former DNAA boss, recognised that the anti-migration strategy put in place after the Lampedusa shipwreck was a failure. But, he attributed it to a lack of cooperation from foreign police rather than any conceptual shortcoming. Lessons were not learnt.
Doubling down
After yet another shipwreck killed at least 94 people 150 metres from the Italian shore in February last year, Giorgia Meloni’s government doubled down once again. This time it established unprecedentedly high prison terms for those convicted of smuggling. Last January, she asked the DNAA to start investigating regular migration flows for potential document fraud as well.
Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, recently visited Italy to learn more about the Italian model of combating irregular migration. At a joint press conference, Meloni said that she and “Starmer agree that the first thing to do is to step up the fight against the trafficking in human beings”. She emphasised that Italy’s strategy was inspired by Giovanni Falcone, the judge murdered by the Sicilian mafia in 1992 shortly after founding the DNAA, and called for a stronger role for Interpol and Europol in anti-smuggling efforts.
Starmer concurred, spelling out the goal of his Italy trip: “to share intelligence, share tactics, shut down smuggler routes, and smash the gangs”.
And around we go.
Explore the rest of the series
This series looks at how the UK, EU and bordering countries are increasingly treating migration as a criminal offence, and targeting migrants and solidarity actors in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’ and ‘border control’.
