Italy under fire for Shalabayeva deportation

The Italian Government is struggling to respond to criticism related to the deportation to Kazakhstan of Mrs Alma Shalabayeva.

Kazakhstan is a dictatorship ruled by President Nursultan Nazarbayev, but the country also has relevant ties with Italy.

Mrs Shalabayeva is the wife of a political opponent of Nazarbayev. On May 29th, Mrs Shalabayeva and her 6-year-old daughter were apprehended by the Italian Police outside Rome and hurriedly boarded on a Kazakh plane which took them back to Astana.

The operation, ordered after pressures by the Kazakh Embassy, was officially motivated with the fact that Mrs Shalabayeva’s passport was fake. But it wasn’t. That’s why the Italian Judiciary declared the expulsion to be null and void. Mrs Shalabayeva could now come back to Italy, but she is already under arrest in Kazakhstan, where she could be tortured or tried by a kangaroo court.

The Government blamed the Police for acting on its own initiative without warning the Ministers. But this is hardly believable, and the opposition wants the Ministry of the Interior to resign. The problem is that the Minister is also the Deputy Prime Minister, and Berlusconi’s senior representative in the Government…