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After fleeing Iran and undertaking the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, Kurdish activist Maysoon Majidi did not expect to be imprisoned in Italy for migrant smuggling.

But the day after arriving on a boat last December, she was arrested and detained for 10 months – a victim, according to her supporters, of the migration crackdown by Giorgia Meloni’s government.

“I tried to say who I was, that I am a political refugee, that I did nothing wrong,” the 28-year-old woman told AFP by telephone from Calabria, in the south. from Italy, where she was recently released.

Speaking in Farsi through a translator, she added: “None of us would want to leave our own country and face all these dangers to get here.

“I had to leave Iran not only to stay alive, but also to be able to continue my work as an activist.”

Majidi arrived in Calabria on December 31, 2023, one of nearly 80 migrants on a boat from Turkey – among the last of the nearly 158,000 people who landed on Italian shores that year.

The next day, she was arrested for aiding illegal immigration, a crime that carries a risk of six to 16 years in prison.

She spent the next 10 months in prison, based on the testimonies of two other migrants who were later withdrawn.

Amnesty International is among those to have taken up his cause, joining a local campaign group and the mayor of Riace, Domenico Lucano.

Lucano, now a member of the European Parliament, was himself condemned for his aid to refugees. He made Majidi an honorary citizen.

She was finally released on October 22 after others on board, including the captain, who is currently being prosecuted, testified on her behalf.

She is waiting for her case to be closed on November 27, after which she hopes to join her brother in Germany and continue her life.

Born in 1996 in the Iranian province of Kurdistan, Majidi studied theater and sociology at university.

She has written several articles under a pseudonym denouncing misogyny in society and made a short film with Kurds who risk their lives transporting goods in the mountains between Iran and Iraq.

The NGO Hana, which documents human rights violations in the Majidi region, confirmed that it was one of its active members.

“I was always under observation when I was at university,” she recalls.

“In 2019, they arrested me and released me, but I knew they were following me and released me to have access to my contacts.”

She and her brother went into exile.

A refugee in Erbil, in the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, she became a journalist and participated in the organization of demonstrations following the death, in 2022, in Iranian police custody, of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurd from 22 years old.

New threats pushed her to flee to Turkey, from where she managed to raise the money needed to take a boat to Italy.

During his incarceration, Majidi organized several hunger strikes to protest his detention and to request an interpreter.

Parisa Nazari, an Iranian feminist activist living in Italy, supported her during this period.

“I could feel her ribs as I held her. She kept asking me, ‘What am I doing here?'” Nazari recalled at a screening in Rome this month last of Majidi’s film.

For NGOs and groups supporting her, Majidi is a victim of the crackdown on irregular migration by Meloni’s far-right government.

Meloni, whose far-right Brothers of Italy party won the 2022 national elections, has pledged to stop boat arrivals, including taking a hard line on traffickers who organize the crossings from ‘North Africa.

Riccardo Noury, spokesperson for Amnesty International Italy, told AFP that “too often we have the impression that people on board migrant boats are arrested to show that the fight against immigration so-called clandestine works.

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