Tribune. The conviction, on September 30, of Domenico Lucano, the former mayor – from 2004 to 2018 – of the village of Riace, in Calabria (Italy), to more than thirteen years in prison, has rightly caused consternation. of all those concerned by the migration issue in Europe. Accusing him of “criminal association aimed at helping and encouraging illegal immigration, fraud, embezzlement and abuse of office”, the sentence is almost double the prosecution’s requisitions.
None of the faults he committed has been a source of personal enrichment. They fall exclusively under administrative law, such as the fact of not having carried out a public call for tenders for the management of municipal waste. Domenico Lucano is above all targeted because of the recognition he has acquired for more than twenty years – as an associative activist first and then as mayor -, to the point of being today one of the great European figures of the world. reception of foreigners. Just like the farmer of the Roya valley, Cédric Herrou, the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, the chancellor Angela Merkel or the mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando…
A virtuous story of hospitality
The politico-administrative harassment against “Mimmo” Lucano dates back precisely to the time when the village of Riace became an emblematic place in the European debate on reception, which led to his arrest and his placement under house arrest, in October 2018, for “help with illegal immigration”. This under the era of the Minister of the Interior and Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, a far-right party, blinded by hatred against migrants and against citizens coming to their aid on behalf of the universality of human rights.
With its 1,800 inhabitants, the village of Riace has embodied a model not only of reception, but also of development and revitalization of local life from migration. What has been called the “Riace model” embodies a policy of reception “from below”. It was she who inspired the so-called “diffuse reception” strategy deployed throughout Italy for several years, before its abrupt end, in 2018, by the same Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini.
More broadly, this village embodies a form of communal hospitality which includes, supervises and goes beyond the individual gesture of citizen accommodation, by giving it a collective framework, rules and common support.
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