Italy: NGOs denounce treatment of migrants following suicide in prison

Rome: The suicide of 42-year-old Moroccan Hamid Badoui in a prison in Turin has sparked outrage from rights organizations. They view his case as symbolic of Italy’s anti-irregular immigration laws, which the political opposition see as ‘repressive.’

Badoui reportedly took his own life 28 hours after being put into the Lorusso and Cutugno prison in Turin, only hours before his validation hearing in court.

According to La Repubblica, Badoui had been arrested on May 17, 2025 on Corso Giulio Cesare for resisting a public official. He had reportedly asked for help in a tobacco shop after he had gotten into an argument and someone was chasing him. The shop owner called the police, and an altercation between Badoui and the officers followed, reported La Repubblica.

Badoui had been in Italy for 15 years but had not obtained stable residence status or citizenship, according to Italian media reports. He had fallen into the cycle of drug addiction and had served a term in prison for about two years, wrote La Repubblica.

Before being transferred to the Turin facility, Badoui had been detained for about a month in the repatriation facility (CPR) in Gjader, Albania, as part of the migration agreement between Italy and Albania.

In statements released after his death, several rights groups linked Badoui’s suicide to his previous detainment and treatment by the Italian state.

On May 20, the Association for Legal Studies on Migration (ASGI) said his death marked “yet another tragic suicide” in prison.

“He was the victim of a repressive regime that first detained him in a repatriation center because he did not have a residency permit, and then deported him to Albania as part of the propaganda operation of the Italian government, and then brought back to Italy following the judicial decision to invalidite his detention and lastly incarcerated him for a crime he may have committed in very uncertain circumstances,” ASGI stated in a press release.

“Hamid Badoui put an end to his life during his last detention, and it is not difficult to imagine his exhaustion when he saw himself once again confined with no way out. His story points to the impossibility for foreigners who already live in Italy to obtain a residency permit. However, it also shows the lack of humanity of a system that is becoming increasingly more ferocious and uses the seizure of migrants as a means of propaganda for its electors,” continues the press release.

According to ASGI, “the people kept in the CPRs or in prisons — there is little difference — are physically removed from (Italian) national territory as proof of strength, even though in practical terms this is futile.”

“These people become increasingly the instrument to implement an unequal power and that does not allow for changes of path. The final objective is the implementation of a society based not on equality of rights, not on equal opportunities of all those who live in a community, not on the rational management of issues related to social change (and migration is part of it), but rather on the creation of a divided society in increasingly more subjugated classes”.

These “form a social ladder, in which the lowest rung is today destined to migrants and that easily extends to other categories that are socially not accepted. This represents the dramatic story of Hamid Badoui, the latest victim, for now, of this dehumanisation which is being carefully implemented by the government.”

The Penal Chamber of Western Piedmont also issued its opinion on the matter. It shared a press release which also mentioned the story of Moussa Balde, the 23-year-old from Guinea who killed himself in the CPR in Turin in 2021, after he was attacked by three locals in what some believe was a racist hate crime.

The press release underscored what the organization calls “a story of abandonment and of justice that turns on those who invoke it.”

According to penal specialists, these two cases “raise serious questions on the way in which fragile and marginalized people are treated and viewed by state representatives when they call for help, (including) because of their status as illegal migrants.”

The Tavolo Asilo e Immigrazione (Asylum and Migration Forum) (TAI) — a coalition of organizations advocating for migrants’ rights — expressed “profound sense of grief and anger” for the death of Badoui in a press release published by several of its member organizations, including Amnesty and Emergency, on Wednesday (May 21).

According to TAI, “his death is the direct result of structural policies of segregation and exclusion that affect people with a migration background”.

Badoui had told his lawyer that “prison is better than staying at the CPR, I will not return to Albania,” they said.

The Albanian model, TAI said, “further exacerbates this: extraterritorial facilities, geographic isolation, difficult access to legal guarantees, obstacles to access to the right to health, widespread use of administrative detention as a punitive measure, rather than as a last resort provided for by international law.”

TAI called for “the interruption of transfers to Albania; an independent investigation on the institutional responsibilities related to the death of Hamid Badoui, and on all the systematic violations in the administrative detention centers; the opening of a public debate on the failure of the administrative detention measures and policies of detention delocalization and on the need for alternative models, based on reception, truth, justice and legal rights.”