Final conviction for corporals: migrants exploited in Nardò were slaves

They were reduced into slavery the migrants, almost all Africans, who between 2008 and 2011 were employed in Nardò in the picking of tomatoes and watermelons. The Court of Cassation, in its ruling 16136, put an end to 13 years of proceedings, confirming the crime of enslavement for the intermediaries, the so-called caporali, and excluding it for the employers. For all is excluded, also due to the absence of an organisation and structure, the crime of criminal association. In the Supreme Court's opinion, the identification in theemployers of the beneficiaries of the reduction of migrants to conditions of criminal exploitation is not sufficient to establish a criminal association with the intermediaries nor coresponsibility in their reduction to slavery.

The legitimacy judges, however, confirmed the enslavement, even without the element of physical coercion. The migrants, almost all of whom arrived by sea irregularly, many with a passage to Libya, had spontaneously gone to Nardò, to pick watermelons and tomatoes, and were free to move. Their 'chains' were, however, those of extreme need, of a condition of subjection that did not allow them to 'interact on an equal footing with their principals and to decide in full autonomy whether or not to render the requested service, based on the amount of the payment and the working conditions offered to them'. The constraint was thus 'the total lack of resources, the absence of work and existential alternatives, the lack of knowledge of the language, the ignorance of their rights'. The result had been the acceptance of extremely degraded conditions, destroyed accommodation, miserable wages deducted from the 'expenses' of having a sandwich and sometimes even water.

A vulnerability exploited by the intermediaries, from which the employers benefited by maximising profits. According to the Court of Cassation, however, this is not sufficient to affirm the responsibility of the entrepreneurs, 'the circumstance that they knowingly took advantage of labour at a very low price and provided in very precarious conditions,' reads the sentence, 'is not sufficient to demonstrate the conscious participation in the substantial restriction of freedom and self-determination that constitutes the objective substratum of the crime of enslavement. For the employers, there is not even the crime of caporalato inserted in our code after the contested facts.

The Court of Cassation therefore rejected the corporal's appeal, as well as that of the civil parties that contested the acquittal of the employers. For the latter, the Public Prosecutor also asked for a conviction, according to which the employers could not have been unaware of the conditions in which the migrants lived - such as to cancel their freedom of self-determination - also by virtue of the amount of contacts with intermediaries. An argument that had only passed at first instance, when, with a historic ruling in 2017, the offence of enslavement was affirmed for the first time in Italy. Now the Supreme Court has confirmed it.