Towering over the shore, the plant throws columns of smoke and dust into the air. A blackish water regurgitates from a pipe below, which ends up in a channel directed towards the sea. All around, the scorched trunks of palm trees unmistakably indicate that the soil has lost all fertility. This is the scenario near the Groupe Chimique Tunisien (GCT) plant in Gabès, a town in the middle of the gulf of the same name in southern Tunisia. Opened in the 1970s and expanding ever since, the factory processes phosphates from the mines of Gafsa, 150 kilometres further south, into phosphoric acid and fertiliser for agriculture.
Back in 2004, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) defined Gabès as one of the Mediterranean’s pollution hotspots and made a series of recommendations to reduce the impact of industrial activities on the environment. Several years later, in 2018, a field study by the European Commission noted how the impact of fine particulate emissions,Sulphur oxide, ammonia and hydrofluoric acid from the GCT caused 95 per cent of the pollution in the city, with devastating consequences for agriculture, fishing, tourism and human health. The report states that pollutants released by the plant can cause ‘asthma, lung cancer and premature death’.
It is from this context that Imed Eddine Jemli fled. This 34-year-old Tunisian citizen arrived by sea in Lampedusa in August 2023 and applied for humanitarian protection for environmental reasons. “The chemical company in my city caused me serious harm and even today no one has been able to define my illness,” he told the Territorial Commission for the Recognition of Refugee Status in Caserta. ‘It started with a simple headache. As time went by, I would get seizures, a pain that started from my head to below my eye, as a result I could not work normally. Since my economic situation was difficult, I couldn’t even have tests to find out what the illness was. That’s why I decided to come here to Italy’. On 21 February, his request for protection was rejected ‘for manifest groundlessness’ and Jemli was subjected to a repatriation order. He appealed to the Regional Administrative Court of Campania and obtained a suspension of the measure for the time being.

‘Ecocide is taking place here’

His case is paradigmatic of an increasingly relevant phenomenon, which is struggling to find legal concretisation, both at national and international level: that of migration for environmental and climatic causes. The Territorial Commissions reject the requests because the reasons behind these migrations do not fall within the specifications of the 1951 Geneva Convention for the right to asylum, nor within the forms of humanitarian protection introduced into Italian law in 1998 and then gradually reduced by various legislative interventions. Since Tunisia is considered a ‘safe third country’, applications for protection from citizens of that country are rejected almost automatically.
But in Gabès the situation is far from safe. Activists, doctors and ordinary citizens tell of it. “A real ecocide is taking place here,” says Khayreddine Dyabala, a 34-year-old engineer who, through his association Stop Pollution, has been fighting for the closure of the factory for some time, organising demonstrations and appealing to politicians. In recent years, he has become an expert on pollutants and the operation of the plant, which he describes in detail. “The most immediate effects occur during the so-called ‘degassing’ operations, i.e. when they clean the machines and expel a huge amount of gaseous substances. Normally these operations are carried out every two months, but in the last period they are becoming more frequent, with significant consequences for the population. Dyabala shows a mobile phone video in which an ambulance can be seen arriving in a school yard and loading children amidst the excited shouts of the teachers. “They asphyxiated the pupils of the primary school nearby. Many of them vomited, others fainted and were taken to the emergency room.”
That respiratory diseases are particularly common in these parts is confirmed by a doctor at the Ghannouch health centre, just behind the plant. “Children suffer from asthma very early on, lung cancer is common. Unfortunately, no study has been carried out to establish a link between the recurrence of these diseases and phosphate pollution,’ says the man, who prefers to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.
In addition to the fumes it spews into the atmosphere, the factory produces permanent, stratified pollution throughout the surrounding area. Dyabala points to the pipe that pours the blackish liquid into the canal, creating dense, oily swirls. “There you have production residues, called phosphogypsum. Inside you find heavy metals of all kinds: from cadmium to arsenic, from zinc to mercury’. The numbers of this discharge, also quoted in the European Commission report, make an impression: 12,000 tonnes a day, 5 million tonnes a year, ending up directly in the bay of Gabès.

A wreck for future memory

This spillage produces a phenomenon that is unique in the entire Mediterranean basin: instead of eroding as the sea rises, here the beach advances. The reason is simple: the beach is not composed of sand, but of these production residues that compact and form a kind of solid clay on which one can walk. One only has to take a walk on this artificial shore to measure the effects of this contamination: on the ground one can see the carcasses of sea turtles and hundreds of fish that have been fleshed out after being rendered deformed. Not far away on the deserted beach, there are planks and decomposed pieces of wood. These are the remains of a shipwreck that has caused much discussion in these parts. On the night of 12-13 August 2023, a boat that had set off from this beach broke up just 120 metres from the shore. Among the twenty Tunisians heading for Lampedusa, a 20-year-old boy and a baby died. “The wreckage remains here for future memory,” says Salah Ghouma, president of the local fishermen’s union. “But also as a warning to our politicians, who do nothing to save our city and prevent young people from fleeing.”             The fishermen’s representative describes a devastating reality for the sector: ‘We don’t fish here because there is absolutely nothing. We have to go very far away, to Zarzis or Djerba, with an increase in expenses and working hours, also creating tensions with our colleagues there’. Ghouma remembers going out in a boat with his father in the crystal-clear sea, where they came from all over southern Tunisia because this was a squid and shrimp breeding ground. Today he looks at this dead beach with a mixture of nostalgia and despair. He has two children who are still young, but the children of the other fishermen are all gone. They took the boat and ran away to Europe. “What else were they supposed to do? It used to be paradise here. They came from all over Tunisia and even from abroad. Now there is nothing left’..

The Mediterranean’s only coastal oasis

Visitors came here to see what was a real gem. Namely: Chenini, the only coastal oasis in the entire Mediterranean basin; an enormous palm grove that also represents an ecological corridor between the sea and the Sahara desert.
A candidate for Unesco World Heritage status for years, it now has little chance of gaining recognition. Because all that remains of the oasis is a vague skeleton. Corrupted by air and land pollution, eaten away by urbanisation without criteria, it is now reduced to a few hundred hectares. Mabrouk Jebri is its living memory. This retired teacher in his seventies remembers when the factory was built in the 1970s. “At first it was a positive event for us. Work and modernity would come. But we soon saw the effects on the environment”.
Gradually the aquifers that had fed the oasis for centuries began to dry up, the water to become scarce. Jebri describes the particular method of cultivation of the place, based on an ancestral system known as the ‘three layers’: at the top there is the date palm, which provides shade and creates moisture for the middle layer consisting of various fruit trees and the lower layer consisting of vegetables and cereals. Today, this system is in trouble, weakened by water shortages caused by industrial uses and increasingly prolonged droughts. Tunisia is one of the countries most affected by the climate crisis in the entire Mediterranean basin, which is itself a global warming hotspot, i.e. a place where the effects are most visible. In a report published in November 2023, the World Bank recalled the urgency for Tunis to take measures to protect the country from climate change risks. According to estimates, the country’s gross domestic product could contract by 3.4 per cent by 2030, with a loss of around 5.6 billion dinars per year (around EUR 1.66 billion), taking into account all direct and indirect consequences.
Jebri nostalgically remembers the time of his youth, when he used to bathe in the now-dry natural pools or when the fields were lush. “Today, there is none of that,” says the former teacher, who runs a cultural centre where members of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) who would like to revitalise the oasis through an eco-tourism programme and an annual film festival that is also an awareness-raising event meet.
“There are also some young people among them, but most have left”. Jebri’s own children are all abroad, left for study and never returned. “They come for holidays. They would like to come back here, but to do what?”, says Jebri. “The oasis system in Gabès no longer exists. The traditional oasis has lost half its surface area and more than half of its farmers; its springs have definitely dried up,’ echoes Habib Ayeb, a Tunisian geographer who knows the situation well because he made a documentary on the oasis ‘Gabès Labess’ (‘All is well in Gabès’). “It was a process of dispossession implemented by the factory, which led to a real migration to other cities or abroad”. Ayeb speaks of a massive exodus and has no doubts in calling the protagonists of these migrations real ‘environmental refugees’. “Because the conditions of the environments in which they had been carrying out their activities for generations have changed, as a result of the policies implemented by the Tunisian state”. This migration has been exacerbated by the effects of the climate crisis, which is particularly virulent here because the intensive exploitation of the eco-system has deprived it of the natural resources to absorb the shocks.

The Teitiota v. New Zealand case and the Supreme Court ruling

Numbers to measure this exodus do not exist. Tunisia’s central statistical office does not provide data on emigration broken down by city or province, nor does our Ministry of the Interior break down the nationalities of landed immigrants by region of origin. It is difficult to say how many arrived from Gabès and its surroundings and how many of them applied for humanitarian protection for environmental reasons.
Activist Khayreddine Dyabala claims that there are many of them. “But their request is normally rejected and, as a rule, they flee to France before being repatriated”. Imed Eddine Jemli is one of the few to have filed an appeal. He is now waiting for the Administrative Court of Campania to rule. As there is no specific legislation for the case of environmental migration, it can only be the courts that define the status and accept in a secondary way applications for protection on such grounds, such as the one submitted by the Tunisian citizen.

In support of his case, there is a 2021 Supreme Court ruling. At the time, a Nigerian citizen from the Niger Delta region, which is particularly affected by the effects of oil exploitation, had filed an appeal after his application was rejected by both the Territorial Commission for Refugee Status and the Regional Administrative Court.
In Judgment 5022/2021, the judges of the Supreme Court stated that ‘environmental degradation, in the UN Committee’s view, can compromise the effective enjoyment of individual human rights, on a par with climate change and the effects caused, in general, by unsustainable development; this occurs when the local government cannot, or does not want to, ensure the conditions necessary to guarantee access to essential natural resources, such as arable land and drinking water, for all, with the consequent compromise of the individual right to life’. All elements that could be valid in your case and that are clearly confirmed by the situation in Gabès and the pollution produced by the factory, with an impact on natural resources and people’s lives.
The direct reference in the Supreme Court’s ruling, when it speaks of the UN Committee’s ‘prospectus’, is to what can be considered case zero in the jurisprudential determination of environmental migration: the so-called Teitiota case. In 2013, a citizen of Kiribati, Joane Teitiota, applied for asylum in New Zealand, claiming that rising sea levels caused by climate change would jeopardise in the following 10-15 years his home and living conditions. The New Zealand authorities did not grant the request and ordered his repatriation. Thus, in 2015, once all legal avenues in the New Zealand courts had been exhausted, Teitiota decided to appeal to the UN Committee on Civil and Political Rights. On 24 October 2019, the UN Committee determined that States have an obligation to guarantee the right to life of persons, which also extends to ‘reasonably foreseeable threats and life-threatening situations that may result in loss of life or otherwise substantially worsen the conditions of existence, including environmental degradation, climate change and unsustainable development, which constitute some of the most serious and urgent threats to the lives of present and future generations’.
While the Committee’s decisions are not binding and, in this case, did not recommend that the asylum be granted, it is interesting to note how they have become a conceptual reference point for a jurisprudence that makes up for both national and international regulatory deficiencies in the area of climate and environmental migration. The same jurisprudence to which Imed Eddine Jemli has appealed, in the hope of seeing his request for international protection granted and to be able to cure himself of what he considers to be health damage caused by the environmental degradation produced by human activities in his city of origin.