A/HRC/43/44/Add.5 and exploitation were unveiled.21 In Apulia and Sicily, the Special Rapporteur confronted the reality of migrant women who face a poor quality of life influenced by exclusion and a widespread culture of illegality. The Special Rapporteur was informed that, as a follow-up to the arrests in 2017, police forces had been more active in intervening to cease similar situations of abuse. 53. In various places, some agricultural workers are not able to obtain adequate legal and social protections, and are subject to physical, sexual and moral violence. 22 It is in this environment that the practice of caporalato,23 or gangmastering, has found fertile grounds to provide illegal intermediation between workers and farmers, which is based on the exploitation of the vulnerability of migrant workers.24 54. With Law No. 199/2016, Italy has enhanced efforts to prevent, and enforce action against, cases of gangmastering. Its new article 601bis criminalizes both the intermediary and anyone who exploits workers (often called “master” by the workers) and takes advantage of their state of need, whether or not there has been illicit intermediation. Recent official figures show an increasing efficiency of Law No. 199/2016. The competent ministries (labour, home affairs and agriculture) coordinate their activities at political and operational levels and have recently adopted a three-year action plan to prevent and combat reported cases. Ten priority actions have been agreed upon to prevent and combat related crimes, and 85 million euros has been allocated to implement the action plan. 55. This law represents a step forward in fighting the practice; however, it is insufficient to guarantee the human rights of all farm workers, in particular undocumented migrants who work in the agricultural system and who are kept in a condition of invisibility and fear because of the current system of migration law and the “law and order” attitude towards migrant workers. 56. The end of permits based on humanitarian grounds, as sanctioned by the Salvini decree, the difficulty in obtaining a permit without a residence or a legal job, the fear of not being able to renew a permit based on humanitarian grounds, the fear of self-incrimination, the absence of any alternative, little awareness of the law, linguistic barriers, the overall environment of the criminalization of migrants, the absence of strong support for integration and the intense competition for the few available jobs are underlying root causes that cannot be tackled with more criminalization alone.25 57. In addition to government legislation fighting against the caporalato system, bottomup initiatives, such as “NOCAP” (“no caporalato”) and “In campo senza caporale” (“in the field without caporale”), have to be widely supported. 26 The Special Rapporteur looks forward to seeing the impact of the recently enacted Lazio Regional Law No. 18/2019 on the fight against irregular labour and the exploitation of farm workers, and the establishment of an observatory and a database for the recruitment of farm workers. The law sets out new criteria for defining the appropriateness of payments and tasks. 21 22 23 24 25 26 Lorenzo Tondo and Annie Kelly, “Raped, beaten, exploited: the 21st-century slavery propping up Sicilian farming”, Guardian, 12 March 2017. Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto/FLAI CGIL, Agromafie e Caporalato. Quarto Rapporto (Rome, Bibliotheka Edizioni, 2018); Oxfam International and Terra! Onlus, Human Suffering in Italy’s Agricultural Value Chain (Oxford, Oxfam GB, 2018); and Terra! Onlus, “Spolpati: la crisi dell’industria del pomodoro tra sfruttamento e insostenibilità – third campaign report” (2016). Maged Srour, “‘Agromafia’ exploits hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers in Italy”, Inter Press Service, 27 July 2018. Alessandro Leogrande, Uomini e caporali (Feltrinelle Editore, 2016); Marco Omizzolo, Sotto Padrone (Milan, Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2019); and Leonardo Palmisano, Mafia Caporale (Fandango Libri, 2017). Amnesty International Italia, I Sommersi dell’Accoglienza (2019). Available at https://immigrazione.it/docs/2020/amnesty-i-sommersi-dellaccoglienza.pdf. See www.nocap.it and www.terraonlus.it/in-campo/. 9