President Emmanuel Macron’s government rejects migrants but “keeps terrorists”, Transport and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Savini (League/ID) said after a French court refused to extradite ten former terrorist members of the Red Brigades group to Italy.
On Tuesday, the French Court of Cassation denied the extradition of ten former Italian Red Brigade members who, despite being sentenced by the Italian courts to varying degrees of punishment – including life imprisonment – for blood crimes, took refuge in France.
Formed in the 1970s, the extreme leftist terrorist group is responsible for numerous murders and kidnappings.
“It is a disgrace. It rejects us children at the Ventimiglia border in the woods and keeps terrorists who should be in jail in Italy”, said Salvini about the French police he says systematically turns back undocumented migrants who try to cross the Italian border through the woods or by train, often to reach relatives in France.
“I ask France, what if the same thing had happened in reverse with the Bataclan victims?”, says Roberto Della Rocca, a survivor of the Red Brigades attacks and president of the Victims of Terrorism’s National Association.
However, the French court justified its decision by upholding the right to a private and family life and the right to a fair trial of ex-terrorists.
When the first instance court decided on the matter in June of last year, Macron commented that “those people, involved in blood crimes, deserve to be tried in Italy”.
MEP: France should do as Denmark
Italy is in the midst of a migration emergency, but most of the migrants landing on the peninsula want to get to other European countries, mainly France and Germany.
According to MEP Vincenzo Sofo (FDI/ECR), the migration phenomenon in France, despite rejections at the Italian border, is so serious that it has contributed to the collapse of the country’s social system.
“The French social system is exploding in large part because it is weighed down by the consequences of the migration phenomenon, which, with the combination of no borders policies, ius soli and family reunification, has disproportionately extended the number of those in need of subsidies and economic aid from the state, which for immigrants alone amount to figures that reach over €20 billion annually”, Sofo told EURACTIV Italy.
“France is a prime example that a nation’s welfare state cannot exist except through border control, as they also understood in Denmark where this issue was instrumental in convincing the left-wing government to tighten its grip on immigration”, the conservative MEP added.
(Federica Pascale | EURACTIV.it)
Source: euractiv.com
