After the dramatic weeks we have lived (again) on the island of Lampedusa, after the images, the stories, the impossibility of knowing how to guarantee a dignified reception to hundreds of men, women and children who have arrived alive after a voyage that promised certain death, one would think that, despite the proclamations and propaganda, humanity and logic would sooner or later find a place.

Instead, yesterday afternoon we found ourselves reading and trying to understand a new government regulation.

Italy has managed to work out how much a person's freedom is worth. 4,938 euros.

This is the cost that a migrant would have to pay our country to avoid being detained in a CPR while waiting for his asylum application to be examined and decided.

Leaving the details to the lawyers who (fortunately!) are already at work to expose the absurdity and virtual unenforceability of this measure, let us try to imagine how it would work.

After an unsettling, long, costly and dangerous journey, after crossing one of the country's borders (the easiest to think of is Lampedusa, which is the water border, the most deadly, but what about the land borders! ), often barefoot, with their clothes and flesh in tatters, their eyes full of fear and anxiety, a migrant must carry with them, in cash, 4,938 euros to pay to the border police to wait in freedom for their asylum application to be processed.

And, in the height of injustice, the Italian state also stipulates that, in the absence of cash, a bank guarantee can be activated! Of course, we all know how easy it is to go to a bank in a country you do not know, where you first arrive in a state of despair, make an appointment with the advisor on duty and set up a bank guarantee. Of course.

And with the same ease, the next thing you know, you are consulting the offers on the property market and finding an apartment to rent on a regular basis, which you can pay for a period that coincides with the assessment of the asylum application, and which, mind you, meets all the housing and habitability requirements.

Yes, because even if it sounds crazy, this is exactly what the regulation published by this government in the Official Gazette yesterday provides for. A detail, a clarification of what was already contained in the Piantedosi 2 security decree (the one written after the Cutro massacre).

Not a word about the possibility of allowing people to obtain regular visas before leaving, so that they do not embark on deadly journeys or end up in the hands of traffickers and torturers. Not a word about the possibility of overcoming the Dublin Treaty and allowing a real and operational redistribution of people across the European continent. No commitment and no action to increase the staffing of the public services responsible for assessing and issuing residence permits, so that the paperwork can be processed within the legal timeframe and not in three or four years! No.

Once again, this government has chosen to treat the migration of men and women as a problem of security and public order that can only be dealt with by repression, detention and expulsion. And when the crimes do not exist, time and resources are spent creating them.

3 October this year marks the 10th anniversary of the Lampedusa massacre.

That shocking shipwreck off the coast of the island that piled up dozens of coffins in a gymnasium and made leaders and administrators cry 'never again'.

We were taught this phrase at school, when every 27 January we remember the horrors of the Shoah and the Nazi and Fascist concentration and internment camps.

Never again, we were taught, will human beings perpetuate barbarity against their fellow human beings.

Never again will innocent lives be sacrificed in the name of propaganda and single-mindedness.

Never again will we remain silent in the face of cries of pain and cries for help.

Eighty years after the Shoah and ten years after the Lampedusa massacre, we are witnessing the unwavering commitment to financially support the construction of lagers on opposite shores of the Mediterranean and the unjustified imprisonment of thousands of innocent people.

There are those in this country who have consciously chosen to retrace those horrors and to make the most violent bribery practices of the traffickers of new slaves the law of the land.

However, 3 October 2018 is also the date of departure of the first mission in the central Mediterranean of the Mare Jonio, our ship dedicated to saving lives.

We, like so many others, will never remain silent in the face of barbarism, we will not leave anyone behind, no voice unheard.

Together with all people on the move, for the protection and respect of human rights, for the free movement of all!

Laura Marmorale, president of MEDITERRANEA Saving Humans

On the cover, the CPR on Corso Brunelleschi in Turin, closed last March.

Photo credits: ANSA