Nancy Porsia

Nancy Porsia was based in Libya for over five years in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, ARD, Deutsche Welle, TRT World, and Repubblica, among others.

Together with Nello Scavo, Porsia was among the first to break the story of the May 2017 meeting in Sicily, at which Bija attended in his capacity as a Libyan Coast Guard commander to discuss restricting migration flows with Italian intelligence officials – the same man the UN Security Council had condemned weeks earlier for sinking migrant boats using firearms. Her investigation into Bija remains one of the most detailed portraits of how the Italy-Libya cooperation functioned on the ground: not as border management, but as the institutionalization of a trafficking network. For this work, Porsia was given a security detail after Bija threatened her and her family.

In 2021, several newspaper, like Guardian and Domani, revealed that journalists covering the Mediterranean migration crisis had been wiretapped by Italian prosecutors. Among them Nancy Porsia, who had been surveilled for six months. Her phones were tapped, her movements tracked, her conversations with lawyers and colleagues recorded – without her knowledge, without legal basis, and without any formal investigation against her. The material ended up in the 30,000-page Iuventa case file. The prosecutors who signed off on the wiretaps were the same ones building the case against the rescue crews.

Porsia investigated Bija. The DNAA coordinated with Bija. The Iuventa rescued the people Bija's militia had been tasked with intercepting and returning to Libya. The wiretaps on Porsia's phone connected all three threads – which is precisely why they were placed there.
Her reporting did not just document the system. It threatened to expose it. You can follow her work here.