After fleeing Iran and making the perilous journey throughout the Mediterranean, Kurdish activist Maysoon Majidi didn’t anticipate to be jailed in Italy for folks smuggling.
However the day after arriving on a ship final December, she was arrested and held for 10 months — a sufferer, her supporters say, of a migration clampdown by Giorgia Meloni’s authorities.
“I attempted to say who I used to be, that I’m a political refugee, that I’ve carried out nothing improper,” the 28-year-old advised AFP by phone from Calabria, in southern Italy, the place she was just lately launched.
Talking in Farsi by a translator, she added: “None of us would wish to go away our personal nation and face all these risks to get right here.
“I needed to go away Iran not simply to remain alive, but additionally to have the ability to proceed my work as an activist.”
Majidi arrived in Calabria on December 31, 2023, one in all virtually 80 migrants on a ship from Turkey — among the many final of practically 158,000 individuals who landed on Italy’s shores that 12 months.
The subsequent day, she was arrested for aiding unlawful immigration, a criminal offense that dangers six to 16 years in jail.
She spent the subsequent 10 months in jail, held on the idea of testimonies from two fellow migrants that had been later withdrawn.
Amnesty Worldwide is amongst those that have taken up her trigger, becoming a member of a neighborhood marketing campaign group and the mayor of Riace, Domenico Lucano.
Lucano, now a member of the European Parliament, was himself convicted for his assist for refugees. He made Majidi an honorary citizen.
She was lastly launched on October 22 after others on board — together with the captain, at present going through prosecution — testified in her favour.
She is awaiting a dismissal of her case on November 27, after which she hopes to affix her brother in Germany, and proceed her life.
– An extended exile –
Born in 1996 within the Iranian province of Kurdistan, Majidi studied theatre and sociology at college.
She wrote a number of articles beneath a pseudonym denouncing misogyny in society, and made a brief movie with Kurds who threat their lives transporting items within the mountains between Iran and Iraq.
The NGO Hana, which paperwork human rights abuses in Majidi’s area, confirmed she was one in all its lively members.
“I used to be all the time beneath commentary once I was at college,” she recalled.
“In 2019, they arrested me after which launched me, however I knew that they had been following me and that they launched me to have entry to my contacts.”
She and her brother went into exile.
Taking refuge in Irbil, within the autonomous Kurdistan area of Iraq, she grew to become a journalist and helped organise demonstrations within the wake of the 2022 dying in Iranian police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd.
New threats pushed her to flee to Turkey, from the place she managed to boost the cash wanted to get a ship to Italy.
– ‘What am I doing right here?’ –
Throughout Majidi’s time in jail, she staged a number of starvation strikes in opposition to her detention, and to ask for an interpreter.
Parisa Nazari, an Iranian feminist activist dwelling in Italy, supported her throughout that point.
“I might really feel her ribs as I held her in my arms. She saved asking me: ‘What am I doing right here?'” Nazari recalled at a screening in Rome final month of Majidi’s movie.
For NGOs and teams backing her, Majidi is a sufferer of a clampdown on irregular migration by Meloni’s hard-right authorities.
Meloni, whose far-right Brothers of Italy get together received 2022 nationwide elections, has vowed to cease the boat arrivals, together with taking a troublesome line on the traffickers who organise crossings from North Africa.
Riccardo Noury, spokesman for Amnesty Worldwide Italia, advised AFP that “too usually, there may be an impression that folks on board migrant boats are arrested to indicate that the combat in opposition to so-called unlawful immigration works.”
