The rules against human trafficking : the "Italian job" and the need for a new, not exclusively legislative, answer

Abstract

This study exposes from one side the latest development of the Italian statutory law on human trafficking and from the other side my personal doubt that the question is only really effective if approached from a criminal law point of view. I remark that the true situation is going from bad to worse. Statutes are more restrictive then ever but the phenomenon is still present and the demand for protection of human rights of migrants is dramatic and actual. The point, in my opinion, is more political and juridical than strictly legal. In Italy and all over Europe the law seems to fight the irregular or clandestine migration with two different options. From one side our criminal rules have been modified to increase the punishment against the persons and criminal organisations, which make a profit from human trafficking and smuggling. From another side the law, even recently, has been modified to increase the punishment against the irregular or clandestine migrants, i.e., in a great numbers of cases, against the ... victims. But even so, the immigration problems are far from solved: the undifferentiated arrest and deportation of thousands peoples is an unrealistic prospect even from a simple and cynical "costs and benefits" perspective. Furthermore one simple dramatic consequence of potential increasing the risks for criminal organisations trafficking in human beings is the concrete and effective increasing of costs and prices (in a very wide sense) for the migrants. In my opinion the point is to face the phenomenon by from one side increasing obviously the control on irregular immigration (and this is only possible in a wider collaboration among European Member States) but from the other side increasing the possibilities to enter regularly in our Countries and at the same time trying to eliminate or to contribute to eliminate the real causes of this emigration.