Prime Minister Enrico Letta pledged Monday to overhaul conditions in Italy's overcrowded refugee holding centres following outrage over a video of migrants being hosed down naked in the cold to disinfect them.
The government had already pledged to improve conditions for welcoming refugees - and received $40 million in EU pledges to do so - after more than 360 would-be refugees drowned off the southern island of Lampedusa in October.
The government was put on the defensive anew after Italian state television last week broadcast a video taken by a migrant of about a dozen men at the Lampedusa holding centre being forced to strip in the cold to be hosed down and disinfected for scabies.
Refugee advocates denounced the practice as violating the rights of the migrants and unworthy of a civilized country.
Lampedusa, a tiny strip of rock closer to Africa than the Italian mainland, is the destination of choice for smuggling operations from northern Africa and has become ground zero in the increasingly volatile debate over how Italy - and Europe as a whole - deals with waves of people fleeing war and oppression from Somalia to Syria.
Letta noted that 2013 saw a three-fold increase in the number of migrants arriving over 2012, and that its holding centres are currently overflowing with 16,000 people.
That pressure, he said, is compelling the government "to immediately get to work on a comprehensive revision of the standards of the (centres) and the way we receive migrants in its entirety."
The government had already pledged to improve conditions for welcoming refugees - and received $40 million in EU pledges to do so - after more than 360 would-be refugees drowned off the southern island of Lampedusa in October.
The government was put on the defensive anew after Italian state television last week broadcast a video taken by a migrant of about a dozen men at the Lampedusa holding centre being forced to strip in the cold to be hosed down and disinfected for scabies.
Refugee advocates denounced the practice as violating the rights of the migrants and unworthy of a civilized country.
Lampedusa, a tiny strip of rock closer to Africa than the Italian mainland, is the destination of choice for smuggling operations from northern Africa and has become ground zero in the increasingly volatile debate over how Italy - and Europe as a whole - deals with waves of people fleeing war and oppression from Somalia to Syria.
Letta noted that 2013 saw a three-fold increase in the number of migrants arriving over 2012, and that its holding centres are currently overflowing with 16,000 people.
That pressure, he said, is compelling the government "to immediately get to work on a comprehensive revision of the standards of the (centres) and the way we receive migrants in its entirety."
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