Iuventa

In 2016, the EU signed a deal with Turkey aimed at containing people seeking refuge in Europe. At the same time, border states including Italy, Greece, and Spain intensified prosecutions against people on the move, often accusing them of smuggling.

As deaths in the Mediterranean increased and state rescue operations were dismantled, ordinary people stepped in. Activists, medics, sailors, and volunteers launched civilian rescue missions at sea. The Iuventa was one of them.

The backlash began almost immediately.

That same year, the Italian government had formally tasked the country’s anti-mafia and anti-terror agency, the DNAA, with investigating rescue ships. In Sicily, prosecutors were already building their case. Ships and offices were bugged, more than 40 phones were tapped, and undercover officers were deployed. Months later, the operation was ready.

After nearly ten thousand deaths in the Central Mediterranean the previous year, the crisis had become a stage for political profiteering during an election summer. Informants planted on NGO ships reported not only to prosecutors, but also to far-right politicians through private channels.

On 1 August 2017, the Iuventa was lured into the port of Lampedusa. Armed vessels surrounded the ship. The crew was interrogated and the vessel searched. Though nothing incriminating was found, the Iuventa was seized the next day.

Selected material from the investigation was leaked to the press and amplified by politicians. The seizure became a public spectacle: a warning aimed not only at one ship, but at the entire civilian rescue fleet. It helped establish a new political narrative around migration in the Mediterranean: rescuers were no longer portrayed as witnesses to a humanitarian disaster, but as accomplices to it.

We were charged with aiding unauthorized migration. In reality, our offense was exposing the violence and failures of Europe’s border regime.

To reinforce the narrative that events in the Mediterranean were driven by transnational criminal networks, the investigation was placed under the authority of Italy’s anti-Mafia directorate. Four Iuventa crew members – alongside professional seafarers and activists from other NGOs – were charged with “aggravated facilitation of illegal immigration,” an offence carrying a sentence of five to twenty years in prison:

The operation was initially set in motion by accusations from a handful of former police officers dismissed from the force and later employed as private security contractors on rescue ships. Casting themselves as covert investigators, they funnelled their suspicions and conjecture to prosecutors and politicians. One of them, Pietro Gallo, was later caught on a wiretap reflecting on their own role in the policing of search-and-rescue NGOs: “The EU didn’t manage, the government didn’t manage. Then a few idiots like us came along and stopped everything.”

But this was not simply the work of a few opportunists. It became a state operation: prolonged, coordinated, and deliberately opaque. Wiretaps and spyware targeted not only the accused, but also journalists, lawyers, doctors, and priests — an investigation that spiralled into a civil liberties scandal of extraordinary magnitude. The Iuventa crew had their computers cloned and their movements tracked. The case file expanded to more than 30,000 pages, filled with surveillance transcripts, speculation, and commentary. No evidence emerged that their activities had ever exceeded the fundamental duty to rescue people in distress at sea.

But evidence was never really the point. The ship was impounded. The crew were side-lined. Other NGOs withdrew or scaled back operations. Solidarity itself was placed under suspicion. For years, the accused were left in limbo: no trial, no verdict. An unresolved case was politically useful. The allegations did not need to be proven, only to persist: “…yes, but what about that case, the one with the NGOs and the smugglers…”

In 2024, a judge finally dismissed the case with a ruling of non luogo a procedure - no grounds to proceed. Even prosecutors acknowledged that there had never been a case to answer to. But by then, the objective had already been achieved. Not justice, but deterrence.

Criminalization did not end with the Iuventa. It became institutional doctrine. More than a dozen new cases have since been opened against rescue workers. The current Italian government headed by Giorgia Meloni also deploys more subtle restrictions on rescue operations, imposing impossibly long itineraries on NGO ships. Meanwhile, new bureaucratic measures have reduced rescue capacity to a trickle. And the sea remains lethal.

But criminalization did not begin with the Iuventa. Across Europe, states imprison people who survived their crossing. Those forced to steer boats (often simply to keep themselves and others alive) are prosecuted as smugglers. The same logic that criminalizes survival is used to suppress solidarity.
Once human mobility itself is criminalized, survival becomes smuggling and solidarity becomes a crime.

The European border regime is a multi-billion-euro industry feeding arms companies, biometric firms, drone manufacturers, and detention contractors. Migration is not being stopped; it is being instrumentalized — to produce fear, fracture solidarity, and create a precarious underclass whose voices are systematically silenced and marginalized.

And what is tested at the border does not stay there. The spyware, surveillance, and impunity refined against migrants re-enter the core of society. The “terrific boomerang” is already turning back: what is inflicted on the unwanted today will be used against everyone tomorrow.

Still, the case forged new connections: between crews, lawyers, researchers, and people on the move themselves. The fleet is scattered, but not broken.
Our utopia: the aspiration for a fully emancipated humanity, remains visible. For us, that is enough of a reason to keep fighting. And for those in power, it is enough to provoke fear.