The Spinelli Affair

Stefano Spinelli, coordinator of the Iuventa's medical teams, had his doubts: about the crew, the tactics, the strategy. "These German NGOs," he told an MSF colleague, "they all come from a no-border background. They don't know the difference between a humanitarian mandate and an activist one."

What he didn't know: his phone was tapped. That conversation, like so many others, first landed in an investigative file, and then on the desks of newsrooms. Soon the papers were full of quotes like this one: "The behavior of this team is damaging the reputation of every NGO vessel currently in operation."

Spinelli was a perfect protagonist. An Italian doctor, board member of the humanitarian NGO Rainbow for Africa, involved in medical development projects across the Global South, and he became the conscience drawing the line between "legitimate humanitarian work" and "political activism."

The role was not entirely made up. As medical coordinator for the Iuventa, Spinelli often handled the communication with the MRCC himself, especially when it came to the contested question of who would take over the rescued and bring them to Italy. In doing so, he learned early on how little the Italian authorities thought of the Iuventa's radical course. Time and again, he kept his distance. Which is precisely what made him interesting to the investigators, who tapped his phone hoping for dirty insider material. When the Iuventa was seized and the investigators leaked excerpts of his wiretapped conversations and emails to the press, Spinelli was furious: taken out of context, he said. That may be true. But the position he had retreated to, the "neutral medic with purely humanitarian intentions", had long since become important and useful, for everyone who profited from the divide.