The Palermo prosecutor's office requested this Saturday a six-year prison sentence for the far-right leader of the League and vice-president of the Italian government, Matteo Salvinifor his actions in August 2019, while he was Interior Minister, during the incident with the Spanish rescue ship Open arms. For 19 days, she prevented the disembarkation of a ship with 147 migrants on board, anchored off the island of Lampedusa. Finally, in a critical situation on board – two bathrooms, all sleeping on the floor, 13 people had jumped into the water and 27 minors had been evacuated – the prosecutor of Agrigento intervened, ordering them to go ashore and opening an investigation. A trial followed during which he was accused of kidnapping and abuse of power, which has been going on for three years and now it is coming to an end. The last hearing, with the last round of the defense, will take place on October 18 and then the sentence will come, which can be appealed.
Oscar Camps, the founder of the NGO Open armssaid it was an “important day for Italian and European justice”: “It is a shame not to be able to be here with the 147 people who suffered unnecessarily from this kidnapping. We are happy with this request and were moved when the prosecutors dedicated their argument to the people rescued (…) This is a particular and unique case, without precedent, different from the trials against other NGOs; in this case, the disembarkation in Italy was voluntarily and arbitrarily prevented. “It was a personal decision of Salvini, it was not a political line of the government”.
The Prosecutor's Office stated that “in this process we are faced with the issue of human rights, life, health and personal freedom that prevail over the right to defend borders.” The Public Prosecutor's Office severely accused Salvini of creating “institutional chaos with his unprecedented position.” “Their strategy was to bend the rule to the closed ports policy,” he noted. Adding that the then Interior Minister “was aware of the illegitimacy of his actions”: “He had an obligation to grant refuge and he did not do so.” Furthermore, it was found that there were 32 minors on board, most of whom were eventually evacuated after a few days: “Minors are very vulnerable victims, not unidentified migrants. They had to be welcomed immediately. And he concluded: “The person who is at sea must be saved, and their qualification is of no importance: migrant, crew member, passenger.”
Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who follows the same hard line as Salvini and relies on the same budgets, reacted bitterly in a few minutes: “It is unbelievable that a minister risks six years in prison for having done his job of defending.” the nation's borders, as requested by the mandate received from the citizens. Transforming the obligation to protect the Italian borders against illegal immigration into a crime constitutes a very serious precedent. “My total solidarity.” A political storm immediately breaks out in Italy.
The La Liga leader, who did not attend the hearing, then took to social media to say: “Six years in prison for blocking the landing and defending Italy and the Italians? Madness. Defending Italy is not a crime and I will not give up, not now and not ever.” And he added in a video: “I plead guilty to defending Italy and the Italians.” “I plead guilty to keeping my word.” In the days before, he was already proud of his attitude and said he would do it again.
Salvini is in a moment of decline in his leadership, with La Liga in decline, and is using this process to campaign politically, present himself as a victim and mobilize his electorate. The party has already announced mobilizations in the next two weeks to support its leader, who today received the support of Elon Musk. The tycoon, who has already supported the far-right president in the past, said that the prosecutor was “crazy” and that he was the one who should go to prison.
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Beyond Salvini, the process establishes a whole aggressive way of opposing the far-right's immigration policy and the confrontation with rescue NGOs, which is still in force today. episode of Open arms It was highly publicised at the time – actor Richard Gere came to support the team – and symbolised the Italian government's offensive against illegal immigration and highlighted the EU's shortcomings in tackling the problem. Salvini, within his drastic policy upon coming to power to close the ports to NGOs, interviewed with the Spanish ship the greatest impulse among the many he undertook with these organizations.
It remains to be seen what the outcome of this process will be. In Italy, convictions are final only in the last instance, cases can drag on for years and reversals of sentences are frequent, which usually prevents political responsibilities from being assumed until they are final. However, a request for imprisonment against the vice-president of the government is a hard blow for the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and also for questions the foundations of its immigration policyone of its main priorities.
What is interesting about this process is that it debates a central underlying issue that still marks Meloni's current policy. In his last intervention, the prosecutor circumscribed the issue: “The key principle is that of rescue at sea, which comes from the The Odysseyfrom ancient times. Even in times of war, there is an obligation to rescue at sea, confirming the universality of beneficiaries. In the interest of this principle, this summer 2019, the ship Open arms has so defied the Spanish governmentwho had not given him permission to go to sea and carry out rescue operations to avoid incidents with Italy; like the Italian, who had forbidden him to enter its territorial waters after having helped migrants in his first operations.
The crux of Salvini's defense and the key to the legal dispute is that he alleges that the blockade of Open arms This is a collective decision of the entire government of Giuseppe Conte, an alliance of the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League. In other words, he maintains that it is a collegiate political act that cannot become a process involving a single individual.
But the members of the Executive who came to testify at the trial, starting with Conte himself, denied it. They insist that it was all their decision. In the midst of the crisis, Elisabetta Trenta, former Minister of Defense, and Danilo Toninelli, of Infrastructure, both from the M5S and who had signed the first decree banning the landing, refused to do so again after it was annulled by an Italian court. They said at the trial that Salvini had acted on his own initiative.
The episode also coincided with the fall of the Italian government, precipitated by Salvini himself, which was then in full growth because the polls presented La Liga as the first party and demanded elections. That is, it happened at a time when the bridges were broken between the two partners of the Executive and Salvini was even exercising the role of interim minister, but accelerating his propaganda gestures. Like his frontal opposition to Open armssymbol of his hard line on immigration. However, later the decision went wrong as a new executive was formed without his training.
“We risk playing politics on the skin of those who suffer”
In his defense, Salvini also argued that on board the Open arms There could be terrorists, a hypothesis dismissed during the trial by the police. He also said that the aim was to force the rest of the European countries to agree on a distribution of the immigrants who wanted to disembark. On this subject, the prosecutor was clear: “There can be no subordination of respect for human rights to the redistribution of migrants. First they are disembarked, because they were in a risky situation on board; then they are distributed. Otherwise, we risk playing politics on the skin of those who suffer.”
The prosecutor developed the political context of the events to explain what happened and painted a portrait of a Salvini determined to take his interests to the ultimate consequences, even above the law: “The government planned to raise awareness in Europe to obtain an equal redistribution of income. migrants and the Minister of the Interior considered that it could unbalance the unit of measurement of the legal assets at stake in favor of closed ports, as an instrument of border defense and pressure on the Member States: faced with the failure of this system, it was subsequently decided not to review it, but to venture into administratively illegitimate and criminally relevant acts.
The Conte government's offensive against immigration, led by Salvini at the head of the Interior Ministry, began in the summer of 2018, as soon as the new executive took office. It was created in June with the famous crisis of Aquariusanother ship with more than 600 people on board that was unable to disembark. Finally, the new government of Pedro Sánchez, who had also just come to power and wanted to signal an opposing policy, agreed to welcome him in the port of Valencia, although it was an isolated gesture. The following year, this already prevented, in fact, Open arms has come to the rescue again in the Mediterranean.
The crisis of Open arms It was the last on the immigration front of this Italian executive, which fell precisely in those weeks, in the summer of 2019. Then another was formed with the entry of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), then that of national unity followed with Mario Draghi. The triumph of Giorgia Meloni's far-right coalition in October 2022 brought Salvini back to power, as vice-president and Minister of Infrastructure.
Since then, the heavy hand on immigration has returned, but Meloni has been more astute and, avoiding a head-on collision, has rolled out a series of regulations that opt for make life impossible for NGOs. For example, they cannot carry out more than one rescue and are then not allowed to go to the nearest port, but to the one assigned to them and they are often sent to points in the north of the country several days away. The principle in conflict is the same as that of the Salvini trial, whether international law that requires saving shipwrecked people or Italian law should prevail. The authorities have already blocked 25 ships for non-compliance with Italian regulations. The last one, this week, from Médecins Sans Frontières, but in this case the judge will be heard later suspended the order and released it. On the other hand, Italy has reached agreements with Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to contain and intercept immigration before arriving in Italy. Thus, after a still complicated year 2023, in 2024 the arrival of irregular immigration decreased by 61%.