ASGI - IN LIMINE project

In Limine is a project led by ASGI (Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration) addressing issues relating to borders control and access to international protection. The project aims to build up strategies to report and fight policies and practices that infringe rights and freedoms of foreign nationals arriving in Italy. The aim will be pursued by gathering information on the field and setting up strategic litigations and advocacy plans.

The project, funded by Open Society Foundation, will start in January 2019. A team of legal workers and cultural mediators will work in Sicily, mainly in Pozzallo, Trapani, Caltanissetta and Lampedusa, implementing the following activities:

• Gathering information and monitoring the procedures while maintaining a continuous dialogue with foreign nationals and with organizations working in border areas;
• Submitting strategic litigations before Civil Courts, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the Constitutional Court to defend foreign nationals and to challenge the legality of new legal previsions introduced by Law No. 132/2018;
• Cooperating with organizations and associations committed to these issues and with attorneys and lawyers working in the region to create and endorse networks which are able to promptly intervene to challenge violations of foreign nationals' rights;
• Promoting advocacy strategies to obtain a greater protection of human rights and to fight the practical impacts of the new law on the quality of rights.

The project also aims to provide a wide vision of border policies and management by analyzing and interpreting in a systematic way legal provisions and their complex and dynamic relation with the society and the public opinion.

The team will work sustained by a Committee of Experts consisting of jurists specialized on migration issues (around 20 experts) and by a Mobile team of Lawyers (around 25) available to intervene when requested to defend foreign nationals and to challenge violations observed by the team.

Law No. 132/2018, converting Decree Law No. 113/2018 (the so called immigration and security decree), introduced a disturbing range of new provisions. In this historical phase, it is considered necessary, in order to properly face the situation, to design the project as a progressive action, open to the participation of other organizations and associations of civil society. In Limine project, pursuing this objective, wants to enhance the creation of networks and other forms of cooperation that, maintaining a strict scientific and operative link, may lead to a propagation of similar experiences in border areas, tackling in a more effective way violations of migrants rights and policies of criminalization of migration.The project was preceded by a pilot project in Lampedusa (March-September 2018) during which practices and methodologies to defend migrants' rights have been tested.

Picture: Boats cemetery, Lampedusa, August 2018. Photo by Luciano Massimi