Former pro-migration Italian mayor gets harsh sentence for ‘abetting illegal migration’

Mimmo Lucano, the former mayor of the Southern Italian town of Riace, who became a symbol of multicultural integration, was sentenced to 13 years and two months in jail for “irregularities” in his management of asylum seekers and for abetting illegal immigration. The sentence was almost double the initial seven years the state prosecutors sought.

Lucano had been put under house arrest in 2018, days after then-Interior Minister Matteo Salvini announced harsh anti-immigration measures.

Since 2004, he served as the mayor of Riace, a tiny town in the Calabria region.  Under his administration, Riace had successfully fought depopulation by welcoming over 500 migrants, preventing the local school from closing down. This earned him a spot on Fortune’s 2016 list of the world’s greatest leaders.

But according to an investigation conducted against him, these integration methods hid his intentions to commit “an indeterminate number of crimes” and maintain power. According to the prosecution, the former mayor circumvented national immigration laws. For example, he is said to have organised marriages of convenience between local citizens and foreign women, allowing them to remain in Italy.

According to his lawyers, Lucano “acted as a faithful representative of the state and interpreter of the Constitution when the state was absent and unable to provide assistance and shelter to refugees who landed in the hundreds on the Calabrian coasts during the Mediterranean emergency. If as mayor he went beyond his faculties, it was certainly not for power, but because he believed in it, and it was right because our Constitution requires it.”

The judgment shocked many who closely followed the trial, including the centre-left parties and the many associations working with migrants in Italy.

(Viola Stefanello | EURACTIV.it)