APRIL 2025
The April issue of Resistenze ai Confini is devoted to a long and painful history of oppression and resistance: that of Italy’s Repatriation Detention Centres (CPR) and their predecessors, the CPT and CIE. Since 1998, when the Turco-Napolitano Law introduced administrative detention for undocumented migrants, more than 47 people have died in these centres, and thousands have been held there without having committed any crime other than crossing a border.
This publication retraces 27 years of abuses, suicides, uprisings, and legislative reforms, up to the most recent developments, such as Decree-Law No. 1660 of April 4, 2025 and the outsourcing of detention to Albania, a project promoted by the Meloni government. This extraterritorial detention policy represents a colonial and authoritarian experiment aimed at hiding migrants from public view and further denying them access to legal defense.
The voices at the heart of this publication are those of survivors and the families of the deceased, whose testimonies reveal the inhumane conditions, forced sedation and psychiatric abuse, routine violence, and systematic denial of fundamental rights within these centres. These are not isolated incidents but rather the visible effects of a structural apparatus designed to punish mobility and control marginalized populations.
This is also a political text. It gathers and amplifies the struggles of detainees, families, lawyers, journalists, members of parliament, and activists who have long demanded the immediate abolition of all CPRs. It is an act of living memory and a collective outcry against institutional violence and historical amnesia.
