Io capitan@. The real crime is the border

A campaign to defend the solidarity of those who support people on the move and to ask for the abolition of rules and laws that criminalise those who drive boats, those who offer help, those who save people in difficulty during journeys made deadly by the border regime which is the only real criminal system that causes hundreds of deaths and which stands in defence of inequalities between human beings.

Before the Crotone court ruled for her full acquittal, the Kurdish-Iranian activist Maysoon Majidi had to spend 300 days in prison. In the reasons for the sentence, the testimonies of her two traveling companions who had accused her were defined as unreliable.

Marjan Jamali also was accused of being a smuggler. She had landed in Roccella Jonica in October 2023. She was with her eight-year-old son. She was immediately arrested and separated from the child, whom she saw again after 217 days in prison, when she was granted house arrest. Her full acquittal came in mid-June 2025.

Both were charged on the basis of testimonies that turned out to be inconsistent.

Two acquittals in the face of hundreds of cases of people who find themselves paying the price of the closure of borders.

With this campaign we intend to overturn the perspective that criminalises border crossing and any form of solidarity support for people on the move. Article 12 of the Italian immigration law text is titled “Provisions against illegal immigration” and establishes that anyone who carries out “acts aimed at illegally procuring the entry [of migrants] into the territory of the state or another state of which the person is not a citizen or does not have a permanent residence permit” is a criminal.

Legal language becomes an artifact to divert attention from the organized violence of borders. This is what exposes the person “to danger for his life or his safety” and subjects him to “inhuman or degrading treatment”. The human will to draw a border and decide who is on one side and who is on the other, or who can live and who can be left to die.

Here is the real abuse: the border, a wound traced on the skin of the earth and of those who inhabit it. The swing of a sword that separates people from each other and from the possibility of saving themselves. And to hide this crime, a very refined art is used: inventing an enemy. An art that cannot afford the compassion aroused by the image of those drowning in the Mediterranean. A fictional bad guy is needed. And it matters little that those who support people on the move do not derive any profit from it. The rules also criminalize solidarity offered without any economic gain.

It is an inverse and functional criminalization that has manufactured the figure of the “scafista”, the trafficker of-human-beings. And to manifacture it, every form of solidarity is made a crime: offering food, offering shelter, providing legal or logistical information, taking the helm of the vessel that takes migrants to safety.

Borders are posited as natural and necessary. But they are anything except that: every border is a human phenomenon and as such can be modified. It has not always existed and will not exist forever.

To cross borders is not a crime. To bring people to safety is not a crime. To arrive in Italy and Europe is not a crime.

What we ask

• The repeal of Articles 12 and 12 bis of the Italian immigration law, which establishes the crime of “aiding and abetting illegal immigration” even in the absence of profit-making.
• The abolition, both at national and European level, of any provision that criminalises border crossing and assistance to people on the move.
• The abolition of border externalisation policies that make migration routes by land and sea lethal and criminalise people on the move and those who assist them in the countries of origin and of transit.

Who we are