Ferry quarantine: The pandemic as a pretext to deny healthcare access to undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers

The outbreak of COVID-19 forced national governments and health authorities worldwide to adopt measures aimed at protecting population health, most of which resulted in prolonged restrictions to individual freedom(s) and funda-mental rights. In some cases, the pandemic represented a pretext for macroscopic and unjustified human rights viola-tions, as in the case of the “ferry quarantine,” that is the use of commercial boats by the Italian Government to forcibly isolate migrants and asylum seekers from the rest of the population. Such a measure does not have any rationale at the epidemiological level and poses serious obstacles to the provision of adequate care to vulnerable people such as migrants and asylum seekers. The pandemic has been used as a pretext to implement discriminatory and dispro-portionate measures whose effect has been denying health-care access to undocumented migrants and asylum seekers