On 10 February 2023, the longest preliminary hearing to date in the case of the four Iuventa defendants and others took place in Trapani, lasting nearly ten hours. It covered defense lawyers’ arguments against admissibility of the Italian government’s request to be added as joint plaintiffs (costituzione di parte civile), as well as the quality of Italian-German interpretation provided during Iuventa defendant Dariush Beigui’s questioning by police.

At the beginning of the hearing, the judge appointed a new German-speaking interpreter and Iuventa defense lawyer Nicola Canestrini asked her a few questions to verify her competence. She was appointed for both proceedings, as the case file still remains split (see the 15 June 2022 monitoring report).

The first issue addressed in the hearing was the request made on 19 December 2022 by the Italian government – specifically the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of the Interior – to be admitted as joint plaintiffs in the case. The defense lawyers for all of the accused in the case presented arguments against the motion, raising both procedural and substantive defects in the request as a basis for asking the judge to rule it inadmissible.

Lawyers representing the three entities accused in the case (two NGOs and a shipping company) focused on issues of inadmissibility of civil actions against legal entities in criminal proceedings under Italian law, where the case law on admissibility of compensation claims against legal entities remains contested. Meanwhile, all defense lawyers raised various flaws with the form and drafting of the government’s request.

The most critical and troubling defect raised by all defense lawyers concerned the actual content of the government’s request. Instead of reporting the actual charges brought by the prosecution against the defendants, which constitute the factual and legal basis to bring a civil claim in a criminal proceeding, the Italian government’s request listed inaccurate facts and groups of incidents. Most importantly, a particular section of the government’s request included extremely serious and false accusations of “belonging to a transnational crime organization dedicated to human trafficking”; “organizing the transfer of migrants from Sudan and Libya to facilitate illegal entry in Europe”; and “carrying out illicit money transfers through the hawala system.” Such grave false allegations prompted Iuventa defense lawyers and others to ask the judge to file a counter-claim for defamation (diffamazione aggravata) with the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

In this respect, Iuventa defense lawyer Francesca Cancellaro declared: “This motion has nothing to do with either the indictment or the investigative files, which are, however, the factual and legal basis from which the existence of damage to the Ministry of the Interior are deduced. Rather, it is the imaginary result of an ill-conceived cut and sew, perhaps stemming from another proceeding in which the prosecutor was previously involved. A carelessness in the drafting of the deed that shows little respect to the defendants and to the court.”

Following the defense arguments, the lawyer representing the State Legal Service of Palermo (Avvocatura dello Stato) that filed the civil claim on behalf of the government asked for the chance to make a brief reply, to which defense counsel consented. He apologized to the parties for what he clearly called a “mistake” and asked the judge to “delete” the section of the government’s request containing the false accusations against the defendants. While such a move was made to prevent the defamation claim from being pursued, the judge must still take into consideration this section for the purpose of ruling on the government’s request. At this stage of the preliminary hearings, there is no opportunity available for the government to formally amend its request. The judge informed the parties that he would only rule on the issue during the next hearing, as he required further time to consider the matter.

The next issue addressed in the hearing concerned the contested sufficiency of the interpretation provided to Iuventa captain and defendant Dariush Beigui during his voluntary interrogation with police. During the preliminary hearing on 19 December 2022, the judge appointed four linguistic experts – two for German, one for English, and one for Italian – to transcribe and assess the interrogation recordings to determine if the quality of the interpretation was adequate to ensure Beigui’s ability to effectively participate in the questioning. At the hearing, one of the linguistic experts (Italian to German) presented the results of the assessment.

In response to questioning by Iuventa defense lawyer Nicola Canestrini, the expert declared that he had observed many incomplete, unclear, and grammatically incorrect sentences in German due to the difficulty of translating long and complex sentences from Italian to German. He also noted that the interpreter during Beigui’s questioning used some words and phrases that are not in common usage, but can rather be characterized as “police jargon” (gergo poliziesco). Ultimately, because of such translation issues, the expert stated that he was “not sure” whether Beigui correctly understood the essential content of the interrogation. Defense lawyer Canestrini highlighted that translation issues are a systemic problem in Italy that jeopardize defendants’ due process guarantees, noting that the national criminal justice system lacks the power to check the up-to-date training and quality of interpreters listed in professional registers. The prosecution focused their questions on the issue of so-called “police jargon,” requesting clarification of the meaning and for concrete examples of its usage during Beigui’s questioning.

After two hours of recess for deliberation, the judge returned to the hearing room at around 18:00 to read his decision on the quality of interpretation. The judge rejected the Iuventa defense lawyers’ claim that the quality of the interpretation provided had been insufficient and hence a ground for invalidity. The judge acknowledged that the interpreter made mistakes and errors during Beigui’s questioning, but considered them to be mere “irregularities” that did not preclude or undermine the defendant’s ability to understand the “essential content” (contenuto essenziale) of the interrogation. Thus, he found no violation of Dariush Beigui’s due process rights regarding access to adequate interpretation.

Judges in Italy possess a wide margin of discretion in determining what counts as “essential content” for a defendant to understand in order to effectively exercise their defense rights, as the term is not further elaborated in the Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of October 20, 2010 on the right to adequate interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings. For this reason, Beigui’s lawyer had requested that the judge refer the question to the European Court of Justice for clarification, but the judge excluded this option.

The next preliminary hearing is scheduled to take place at the Court of Trapani on 25 February 2023.