For five years the internationally acclaimed Riace project to welcome and integrate refugees has been on trial in Riace, in Calabria. The project, developed over twenty years and led by ex-mayor, Mimmo Lucano, combined providing homes and work/studies for refugees with regenerating the depopulated and dying small southern town. In 2018 the project was abruptly terminated by a right-wing political assault, notably by the Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.
The project was represented as one of ethnic replacement. Criminal charges included conspiracy and fraud, criminal association and embezzlement. In September 2021 the Court in Locri sentenced Lucano to thirteen years and two months imprisonment and he was ordered to repay 500,000 euros provided by the EU and the Italian government for the maintenance of the refugees. Altogether the 18 defendants received a total of eighty years imprisonment. The subsequent appeal resulted in an acquittal in October 2023 on nearly all of the charges. The reasons for that judgement have just been published. The same mass of evidence that was deviously used to manufacture criminal convictions in the first place have now been shown to justify this acquittal.
A significant twist in the story, above all of course for the defendants (Mimmo Lucano spoke afterwards of “emerging from a long tunnel”), but also in terms of the wider outcome of an intensely political trial. From its outset, the prosecution of Riace had cast a shadow over Italy’s democracy and judicial system, as the centre-piece of a broader campaign of criminalization of solidarity activism and action in defence of human rights.
From the historic nadir of the Locri judgement, the story comes here to a clear, intelligible conclusion, reinstating the truth that Riace was what we all knew it was, an innovative experiment in welcoming and integrating refugees, and not a conspiracy executed by a criminal association. The appeal judges found that Mimmo Lucano, who had been depicted as a greedy cheat only driven by his own ambition, “has not even thought of profiting from refugees”: rather he had always pursued his own ideals of helping those most in need, both refugees and the poor people of his village.
This should not have needed to happen. And yet, it is good that it did. Having been present throughout the trial, I (Giovanna) had been shocked by a first-instance judgement that was like the classic ending of a political trial: a complete inversion of reality, and the superposition on the facts of an inverted narrative presenting acts of solidarity as a crime – although everybody could easily see the differences between Riace (an internationally acclaimed experiment, not long ago the model and examplar of a progressive national policy) and a criminal association like the ‘Ndrangheta’ which in fact infests Calabrian local state and society (see the detailed analysis in Processo alla solidarietà, La Giustizia e il caso Riace, edited by Giovanna Procacci, Domenico Rizzuti and Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo, Castelvecchi, Rome, 2023).
In comparison to that shocking experience, reading this second judgement has been for me a pleasure, a kind of feeling rarely associated with reading this kind of text. It was pleasing to follow how the appeal judgement undertook to explain what had happened during the trial, with a critical analysis of the evidence which should have been conducted by judges who instead only doubled down on the theories of the prosecutors. The appeal judges accepted most of the defence lawyers’ arguments against the Locri judgement.
They criticized the first instance judgement for relying on a confused mass of wiretap transcripts and forced interpretations of ambiguous remarks, as a way of obscuring the fundamental lack of direct evidence; the appeal judges indeed excluded wiretap materials from consideration of most of the charges, and looked for evidence that had been produced other than recorded conversations. They took responsibility for determining what had been proved and what had not; they found that “without wiretaps, there is no evidence of the supposed criminal act”; consequently “the defendants must be acquitted because there is no evidence that a criminal act has been committed [il fatto non sussiste]”. Specifically, there was no evidence of misappropriation of public funds: on the contrary, Lucano had been constantly pursuing an “economy of hope”, a struggle to reverse his village’s abandonment and solitude, motivated only by his own ideal of solidarity.
The reconciliation of the judicial narrative with common-sense truth about the Riace project is good news. Because political trials reverse the sense of actions they persecute and present them as crimes. “The world turned upside down”, as the former judge Livio Pepino commented after the Locri sentence. Such a reversal opens a gap between the judiciary and the people which is dangerous to democratic life. In the case of Riace, it is good to see that the endeavour of turning things upside down has collapsed disgracefully, that the contestation of a political trial was eventually successful, that the true meaning of Riace experiment and Lucano’s action has been restored, that the gap between what we all know about Riace and justice has been closed.
Nevertheless, five years of political and judicial assault destroyed a community, closed down a fully functioning refugee welcome service developed over two decades, expelled and scattered vulnerable asylum seekers, cancelled the “economy of hope” that Lucano tried to realize, reverted the village to its silence and isolation. Meanwhile, those who have been responsible for such destruction remain unpunished. In all these respects, the trial of Riace has been a dark paradigm of European political trials of refugee solidarity activism, such as the prosecutions of, among others, the activist Cédric Herrou in France.
Ed: West England Bylines and our sister publication North East Bylines have published many articles on the saga of the Italian right-wing trying to criminalise a model humanitarian project. Here is a list of our articles (in chronological order):
- 20/10/20 Hazel Pennington
https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/news/world/migration-is-it-undervalued/ - 18/1/21 Hazel Pennington
https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/news/world/riace-solidarity-on-trial/ - 1/10/21 Colin Gordon
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/pro-refugee-italian-mayor-lucano-receives-prison-sentence/ - 2/10/21 Hazel Pennington
https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/news/world/mimmo-lucano-sentenced-to-13-years-in-prison/ - 4/11/21 Giovanna Procacci
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/solidarity-on-trial-mimmo-lucano-and-the-riace-experiment/ - 11/11/21 Giovanna Procacci
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/solidarity-on-trial-the-anatomy-of-a-political-trial/ - 18/11/21 Giovanna Procacci
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/solidarity-on-trial-is-integration-a-crime/ - 23/11/21 Giovanna Procacci
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/solidarity-on-trial-a-judicial-monstrosity/ - 18/12/21 Hazel Pennington
https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/news/world/imprisoned-for-daring-to-welcome-strangers/ - 25/6/22 Hazel Pennington
https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/news/world/fortress-europe/ - 19/9/23 Colin Gordon Luigi Ferra-Joli
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/mimmo-lucano-the-crime-of-solidarity-in-the-dock/ - 27/9/23 Colin Gordon Giovanna Procacci
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/nearing-the-close-of-lucanos-appeal-the-defence-has-its-say/ - 7/10/23 Hazel Pennington
https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/politics/immigration/riace-project-the-appeal/ - 14/10/23 Colin Gordon
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/justice-has-its-day-mimmo-lucano-is-free/
Ed: Another useful link, depending on how good your Italian is, is:
- Mimmo Lucano speaks at the Palazzo Reale Milan in 2019 – https://www.peacelink.it/cultura/a/46930.html
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