Rome Probes Doctors Who Treated Migrants, and Puglia Knows the Drill

Italian rights groups on Thursday criticised prosecutors for investigating doctors suspected of helping undocumented migrants avoid being held in detention centres, according to The Local Italy. The outlet reported the anger the probe has stirred among organisations that work with migrants, though it did not name the prosecutors, the region concerned or the number of doctors under scrutiny.

The case turns on a familiar tension in Italian migration policy: the line between medical duty and the state's machinery of detention. Doctors are bound by professional obligations to treat patients regardless of status, while prosecutors in this instance appear to be testing whether that duty shaded into helping people evade administrative detention.

For Puglia the story is not abstract. This is an Adriatic region with a long record of arrivals on its southern coast and a standing argument, in foreign coverage of the Mediterranean frontier, over who carries responsibility for people who land here. The wire does not place this particular investigation in Puglia, and La Veduta does not claim that it does.