A 25-year-old Nigerian man identified as Prince Jerry killed himself in Italy after authorities denied him a residence permit.
Jerry’s funeral was held Friday morning, at the Chiesa dell’Annunziata in Genoa.
Prince Jerry was a chemistry graduate and was continuing his studies at a University having arrived from Libya on a boat two and a half years ago.
In mid-January his appeal to stay in the country was rejected and he fell into a deep depression, according to sources close to Jerry, who was staying in Tortona in Piedmont at the time of his death.
Italian authorities have been denying residence permits in their hundreds and have started removing migrants from centres as the government’s hardline immigration measures kick in.
Approved in December, the Salvini decree, named after Matteo Salvini, the interior minister and leader of the far-right League, abolishes humanitarian protection for those not eligible for refugee status.
After discovering he couldn’t count on the humanitarian permission that was cancelled by the recent decree, one of our boys took his own life, said Fr Giacomo Di Martino of the charity Migrantes.
Fr Alex Zanotelli, a member of the Comboni missionaries in Verona, described Jerry’s death as a state murder and the bitter fruit of the Salvini decree which besides insecurity, produces deaths.
“Many of the migrants and refugees we treat in our projects have already passed through traumatic experiences in their journey, in many cases with episodes of violence and torture in Libya”, a psychologist, Lilian Pizzi, with Medecins Sans Frontier res in Rome, told reporters.
“When they arrive in Europe they are often ‘retraumatised’ by arbitrary policies that reduce their rights and by an atmosphere of hate and racism amplified by the media. And all this exacerbates a sense of powerlessness and exclusion. “