The Right to Documentation, or papers, as articulated in the Charter of Palermo, is grounded in the principle that access to legal recognition is essential to the realization of human rights. The Charter critiques bureaucratic and legal systems that delay, deny, or restrict access to documentation. It argues that these systems create artificial barriers to belonging, reinforce inequality, and undermine human dignity. The Charter calls for more inclusive and accessible pathways to legal recognition, including the regularization of undocumented individuals. 

Beyond the Charter itself, the administration of Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando took some concrete steps to realize people’s right to papers that grant legal status and the rights that follow from it. In 2019, in opposition to the Security Decree issued by then-Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, Mayor Orlando signed over 100 migrants’ residence permits, exercising Italian mayors’ constitutional right to do so. That same year, the Orlando administration created the House of Rights, a municipal office dedicated to supporting migrants seeking legal papers and overseeing the asylum seeker shelters in the city. 

Migrant-led community organizations do at least as much to support people’s access to papers, mainly the numerous documents required in Italy, but also renewal of their passports and other essential documents from their countries of origin. Members of migrant and diaspora associations, as well as migrants who run private service centers (Patronato CAFs) assisting people seeking legal papers, do this work every day, often free of charge. 

More often than any other right, participants in this research project identified access to legal papers as a right they and other members of their communities were denied in Italy. Numerous participants expressed how access to all sorts of papers and rights – including to work, housing, healthcare, among many others – depends upon people having other papers, especially for legal residence. 

However, since the national government’s Cutro Decree of 2023, Italy essentially puts migrants in a catch-22 in which they must have legal residence to acquire a work permit, but they must have legal work to obtain legal residence. Some people find legal pathways around this. But more broadly, Italy’s documentation regime and asylum system produce illegality, denying people the ability to legalize their residence, work, and other aspects of their lives.