The Palermo Prosecutor’s Office has requested this Saturday a six-year prison sentence for the far-right leader of the League and vice president of the Italian Government, Matteo Salvini, for his actions in August 2019, when he was Minister of the Interior, in the incident with the Spanish rescue ship Open ArmsFor 22 days, he 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 toilets, everyone sleeping on the floor, 13 people had thrown themselves into the water and 27 minors were evacuated – the Agrigento prosecutor intervened, ordered them to go ashore and opened an investigation. A trial followed in which he is accused of kidnapping and abuse of power, which has lasted three years and is now coming to an end. The last hearing, with the final turn of the defense, will be on October 18 and then the sentence will come, which can be appealed.
“In this process we are dealing with the issue of human rights, life, health and personal freedom, which prevail over the right to defend borders,” argued the prosecution, which harshly accused Salvini of creating “institutional chaos with his unprecedented position.” “His strategy was to bend the law to the closed port policy,” it said. It added that the then head of the Interior Ministry “was aware of the illegitimacy of his actions” and “had the obligation to grant a safe port and did not do so.” In addition, it was noted that there were 32 minors on board, most of whom were eventually evacuated after a few days: “The minors are highly vulnerable victims, not unidentified migrants. They should have been taken in immediately.”
Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who is following the same heavy-handed line as Salvini and based on the same assumptions, reacted bitterly within a few minutes: “It is incredible that a minister risks six years in prison for having done his job defending the nation’s borders, as required by the mandate received from the citizens. Turning the duty of protecting Italy’s borders from illegal immigration into a crime is a very serious precedent. My full solidarity.”
The leader of La Liga, who did not attend the hearing and has not yet commented, has always maintained that he was only doing his duty, defending his country, and that he would do it again. “I hope that common sense prevails, because defending borders is not a crime,” he repeated today in an interview with the conservative newspaper. I freeHe added that it was an election promise that he had to keep: “They asked me to stop the landings.”
Salvini is facing a period of decline in his leadership and is using the trial to campaign politically and present himself as a victim. “I risk 15 years in prison for having kept my word to the voters. I would do it all over again: defending the borders from illegal immigrants is not a crime. Go ahead, without fear,” he wrote this morning on social media. For now, the League has already announced mobilisations for the next two weeks to support its leader. At the start of the trial, the founder of the NGO Open Arms, Oscar Camps, declared that it is “a unique case”. “It is an important day for Italian justice,” he added.
Beyond Salvini, the process puts in the dock a whole aggressive way of dealing with the immigration policy of the extreme right and the confrontation with the rescue NGOs, which is still in force today. The episode of the Open Arms It was a highly publicised event at the time – actor Richard Gere came to support the crew – and it symbolised the Italian government’s offensive against illegal immigration and highlighted the EU’s shortcomings in tackling the problem. Salvini, within his drastic policy of closing ports to NGOs upon coming to power, maintained the longest stand-off of the many he undertook with these organisations with the Spanish ship.
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The outcome of this process remains to be seen. In Italy, sentences are not final until the last instance, cases can last for years and sentences are frequently overturned, which often prevents political responsibility from being assumed until they are final. However, a request for imprisonment for the vice president of the government is a hard blow for the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and also calls into question the basis of her immigration policy, one of her top priorities.
The interesting thing about the process is that it debates a central underlying issue that still marks Meloni’s current policy. The prosecutor has framed in his final intervention what is at stake: “The key principle is that of rescue at sea, which comes from The Odysseyfrom ancient times. Even during war, there is an obligation to rescue at sea, confirming the universality of the beneficiaries.” In the interest of this principle, that summer of 2019 the ship of Open Arms He challenged both the Spanish government, which had not given him permission to set sail and carry out rescue work to avoid incidents with Italy, and the Italian government, which had prohibited him from entering its territorial waters after having helped migrants in his first operations.
The core of Salvini’s defense and the key to the legal conflict is that he claims that the blocking of the Open Arms It was a collective decision by the entire Giuseppe Conte government, an alliance of the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League. In other words, he maintains that it was a collegial political act that cannot be turned into a trial of a single individual.
However, the members of the Executive who have testified at the trial, starting with Conte himself, have denied this. They claim that it was all his decision. In the midst of the crisis, Elisabetta Trenta, former Minister of Defence, and Danilo Toninelli, Minister of Infrastructure, both of the M5S and who had signed the first decree to prohibit the landing, refused to do so again after it was annulled by an Italian court. They declared at the trial that Salvini acted on his own.
The episode also coincided with the fall of the Italian government, precipitated by Salvini himself, who was then in a state of strength because the polls showed the League as the leading party and demanded elections. In other words, it occurred at a time when bridges were being broken between the two partners in the Executive and Salvini was even acting as an acting minister, but accelerating his propaganda gestures. Like his frontal opposition to the Open Armsa symbol of his hard line on immigration. Although the move later backfired because a new Executive was formed without his training.
“We risk having politics made on the skin of those who suffer”
In his defense, Salvini has also argued that on board the Open Arms There could have been terrorists, a hypothesis ruled out by the police in the trial. He also said that the aim was to force the other European countries to agree on a distribution of the immigrants who wanted to disembark. On this, the prosecutor was clear: “There can be no subordination of respect for human rights to the redistribution of migrants. First they are made to disembark, because they were in a risky situation on board, then they are distributed. If not, we risk politics being played on the skin of those who suffer.”
The prosecutor has elaborated on the political context of the events to explain what happened and has portrayed a Salvini determined to pursue his interests to the ultimate consequences, even above the law: “The Government planned to raise awareness in Europe in order to obtain an equal redistribution of migrants and the Minister of the Interior has considered that it could unbalance the unit of measurement of the legal assets at stake in favour of closed ports, as an instrument of defence of borders and of pressure on the Member States: given the failure of this system, it was then 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 sat down. It began in June with the notorious crisis of the Aquariusanother ship with more than 600 people on board, which was prevented from disembarking. Finally, the new Government of Pedro Sánchez, which had also just come to power and wanted to give a signal of an opposite policy, agreed to welcome it in the port of Valencia, although it was an isolated gesture. The following year it already prevented the Open Arms came to the rescue again in the Mediterranean.
The crisis of Open Arms It was the last on the immigration front of that Italian Executive, which fell just in those weeks, in the summer of 2019. Then another was formed with the entry of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), and then a national unity coalition followed with Mario Draghi. The victory of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right coalition in October 2022 returned Salvini to power, as vice president and minister of infrastructure.
Since then, the crackdown on immigration has returned, but Meloni has been more astute and, avoiding a head-on collision, has deployed a series of rules that choose to make life impossible for NGOs. For example, they cannot carry out more than one rescue and then they are not allowed to go to the nearest port, but to the one assigned to them and are often sent to points in the north of the country several days away by boat. The principle in conflict is the same as that of the Salvini trial, whether international law that obliges the rescue of shipwrecked people or Italian law should apply. The authorities have already blocked 25 ships for violating Italian rules. The latest, this week, was that of Doctors Without Borders, but in this case the judge then suspended the order and set it free. On the other hand, Italy has established agreements with Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to contain and intercept immigration before it reaches Italy. Thus, after a still complicated year in 2023, in 2024 the arrival of irregular immigration has decreased by 61%.
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