On December 15, 2015, the Community of Sant’Egidio and the Italian Federation of Protestant Churches signed a joint memorandum with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior officially launching the Humanitarian Corridors initiative, a private program established and completely financed by these Christian organizations. The program provides asylum seekers with a safe and legal pathway of migration to Italy. The program also seeks to integrate the newly welcomed refugees into Italian society after their arrival.
The legal framework of the 2015 memorandum initiated a two-year project that brought one thousand Syrian asylum seekers to Italy, many of whom had previously sought refuge and shelter in Lebanese camps.
On January 12, 2017, a protocol was signed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior, the Community of Sant’Egidio, and the Italian Bishops’ Conference, the latter acting through Caritas Italy and Pro Migrantes. This protocol sought to bring five hundred vulnerable refugees—mostly Eritreans, but also South Sudanese and Somali—from Ethiopia to Italy. Ethiopia is one of the so-called “transit countries,” hosting about one million African refugees in refugee camps and in its capital city of Addis Ababa.
The first airplane operating under this joint protocol landed at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on November 30, 2017, and since then a total of five hundred refugees from the Horn of Africa have safely reached Italy. Forty-five dioceses and parishes, eleven local Sant’Egidio communities, and other Catholic organizations have been hosting refugees across eighteen Italian regions, from the far north of the country near the Austrian and Swiss borders to the southern Sicilian coast, one place where the dangerous ships carrying asylum seekers dock after crossing the Mediterranean.
