Sicilian prosecutors investigating NGOs and maritime rescue charities for alleged complicity in smuggling people have tapped several Italian journalists covering the migratory crisis in the central Mediterranean and allegedly exposed their sources.
This month, prosecutors in Trapani accused charities rescuers, including Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders, of collaborating with smugglers after thousands of people were saved from drowning in the Mediterranean.
Italian newspaper Domani revealed on Friday that, in the course of their investigation, prosecutors secretly recorded dozens of conversations between journalists and rescue workers who did not know their phones had been tapped.
The newspaper published the contents of an archive assembled by magistrates containing the transcripts of dozens of conversations between at least seven reporters and their sources, in apparent violation of their journalistic rights.
Lawyers and watchdog organizations have described the move as one of the most serious attacks on the press in the history of Italy.
The documents show prosecutors in Sicily secretly recorded conversations between reporters and charity officials, in which they discussed details of the trip and confidential information about the preparation of their articles.
“Among the reporters whose conversations have been tapped are journalists who risked their lives to expose the tragedy in the central Mediterranean or the torture of migrants,” investigative reporter Andrea Palladino told the Guardian. “This is a movement that seriously undermines freedom of information.”
The most serious case appears to be that of Nancy Porsia, a journalist described by prosecutors as a freelance journalist and specialist in Libya who has worked for publications such as Repubblica, Sky, Al Jazeera and The Guardian.
Prosecutors allegedly tapped Porsia’s phone for several days, collecting personal details and the names of their sources, Domani said. Investigators also tracked his movements using his cell phone’s geolocation feature.
In 2019, after reporting the criminal activities of a human trafficker who worked for the Libyan coast guard, Porsia and another journalist, Nello Scavo, from Avvenire, received police protection.
Prosecutors heard calls from both journalists, with Scavo’s conversation taped while he was talking to a source about how to receive a video showing the violence suffered by migrants in Libya. Scavo’s own phone was not tapped.
“At that time, I gave the authorities and the police important information about the network of traffickers, about their connivance with politics in Libya,” said Porsia. “But it is clear that while I was providing this information, they intercepted my calls.”
She added: “The sad thing is that at that time they knew that my life was in danger after the threats of the traffickers and, instead of protecting me, they followed my movements”.
Other journalists whose calls have been intercepted include investigative journalist Francesca Mannocchi; Sergio Scandura, correspondent for Radio Radicale in Sicily; and a reporter for the newspaper El Mundo.
Andrea Di Pietro, media lawyer and legal adviser to Italian watchdog Ossigeno per L’informazione, told the Guardian that the scandal was “one of the biggest attacks on the press in the history of this country”.
Di Pietro said it is not forbidden to tap journalists if they are suspected of committing crimes, “but in this case, it appears that the journalists in question are not being investigated by the prosecutor.”
“Under Italian law, telephone taps related to the conversations or communications of these people – such as journalists – who benefit from professional secrecy cannot be used.”
Italian prosecutors intercepted a journalist’s conversations in 2017, when prosecutors accused of mistaking a refugee for one of the world’s most notorious smugglers have tapped Guardian correspondent Lorenzo Tondo.
At the time, documents produced in court showed that Palermo’s prosecutors secretly recorded two conversations between Tondo and one of his sources.
In 2019, Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, an Eritrean refugee who spent more than three years in prison, was acquitted by a judge of being a big man in human trafficking, confirming Tondo’s reports that he was the victim of an identity mistake .