The teams’ job will be “to assess the reported sharp increase in acts of violence and racism against migrants, persons of African descent and Roma,” Bachelet said in her maiden speech in Geneva.
“Italy’s decision to close its sea ports, denying entry to NGO rescue ships, had serious consequences on the most vulnerable,” she added.
“Even though we are seeing a big drop in the numbers of coming from Libya over the past 12 months, the numbers of those who died during the crossing is higher in the first six months of 2018 than it was.”
Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini has spearheaded the introduction of a series of anti-immigrant policies, including closing Italian ports off to migrant rescue ships.
Salvini slammed Bachelet’s comments on the situation in Italy as “biased” and “misinformed”.
“Italy has over the last few years accepted 700,000 immigrants, including many illegals, and never got any help from other European countries,” he wrote on Twitter.
“So we won’t take lessons from anyone, let alone the UN.
“They should first focus on other members where fundamental human rights are being violated every day.”
During her debut speech, Bachelet didn’t limit her concerns to just Italy and Austria.
The former president of Chile also touched on other pressing issues across the globe, including the “unlawful killings, deprivation of liberty, torture, sexual violence, forced labour, extortion and exploitation” of migrants in Libya, the “deeply disturbing allegations of large-scale arbitrary detentions of Uighurs and other Muslim communities, in so-called re-education camps across Xinjiang”, and the United States’ “unconscionable” separations of migrant families.
