On the May 7, 2009, then Italian minister of interior Roberto Maroni proudly announced the beginning of a new policy on the management of migration flows through the Mediterranean: “All migrant boats intercepted at sea will be brought back to Libya.”
The so-called “pushback” policy resulted in the return of nearly 1000 migrants—mostly asylum seekers from Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan—to Libya, a country that has not signed the Geneva Convention and doesn’t recognize the right of asylum. Migrants forcibly returned were then put in detention centers and submitted to a variety of abuses.
The pushback operations were a direct consequence of the new alliance between Italy and Libya, under the auspices of a 2008 “Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation.”