On Monday March 21, lawyers for Domenico “Mimmo” Lucano, former mayor of the small Italian town of Riace, lodged a final appeal against his sentence handed down last October. The date of the verdict remains unclear, but if the appeal fails, Lucano faces thirteen years behind bars. The local politician’s demise from Fortune’s list of the world’s fifty greatest leaders to spending the last year under house arrest is another battle in the Italian right’s long war on immigrants and progressives. It’s a grim irony that the week Italy welcomes Ukrainian children, to international acclaim, has also seen one of the architects of such integration policies in a battle for his freedom.

Like many rural Italian climes, Riace once faced terminal decline. Emigration and declining birth rates across the country have depopulated the countryside, causing many towns to develop schemes involving selling homes at a nominal €1 to foreigners who agree to settle there. Riace, in the southern Calabria region, took a much less gimmicky approach, embarking on a bold plan to renew its fortunes through resettling thousands of refugees. It is not the only Italian community to adopt such a strategy — Sutera in Sicily is another recent example — but it is the most long-established and internationally renowned.

The town first hosted Kurdish refugees in the 1990s. According to Lucano, one of the refugees at the time said that the region reminded him of Kurdistan and he wanted to stay. “That’s when I spoke to the bishop, who told me it was prophetic intuition,” Lucano told Progressive International in a wide-ranging interview. “I realized that the bishop and I shared a vision and beliefs in terms of social equality and fraternity.” Riace continued to provide housing, health care, and opportunities to people seeking safety, and Lucano was elected mayor three times.