At the end of a 7-hour indictment, The Palermo prosecutors have asked to sentence Matteo Salvini to 6 years in prison for having prevented the landing of 147 migrants in Lampedusa five years ago, when he was Minister of the Interior in the Conte government, on charges of having kidnapped them on board the Spanish ship Open Arms.
A request that had a disruptive effect in the world of politics: “Never before in history has any government and minister been accused and tried for defending the borders of their country,” commented Salvini.
According to the Palermo prosecutors, Salvini would have acted in 2019 not for a strategy agreed with the Conte government, as the defense claims, but for the interest in increasing his electoral consensus by leveraging the fight against illegal immigrationa. According to the prosecution, there was no danger of terrorism on board the ship and therefore there was no need to protect the sovereignty of the State. Furthermore, the conditions of the migrants for that action worsened day by day.
To motivate the request for conviction, the prosecutor Marzia Sebella underlined that «the POS should have been released without delay and immediately, the denial was in contempt of the rules and not to continue with a government plan, and that conscious and voluntary denial violated the freedom of each of the 147 people and there was no reason». Then a thought for the migrants, «the great absentees in this trial: there were no offended people, most of them are untraceable, but not because they are illegal immigrants or criminals, maybe because they don’t have a home. We will read the names of these people one by one to remember them». Words appreciated by Oscar Camps, founder of Opem Arms: «We are excited».
Deputy Prosecutor Geri Ferrara, together with his colleague Giorgia Righi, stated that «This is not a political process: administrative acts such as the delay or denial of the assigned port for disembarking have been evaluated. The key element, for the prosecution, was when Salvini took on the role of minister and moved decisions on the management of landings and the release of POS from the Department of Civil Liberties and Immigration to his cabinet office. In short, it was him who made all the decisions, he was the one who was constantly and daily informed». For the prosecutors «the idea of putting the protection of national borders before human rights is unacceptable. There is a key principle that is not debatable: in our legal system, fortunately democratic, human rights prevail over the protection of state sovereignty», underlined Geri Ferrara. Who concludes: «The person at sea must be saved and their classification is irrelevant: migrant, member of a crew or passenger because according to the international law of the SAR convention even a human trafficker or a terrorist must be saved, then if necessary justice takes its course».
While waiting for the defense’s response scheduled for October 18, lawyer Giulia Bongiorno said: «It is enough to examine the documents, and not make hypotheses and theorems, to realize that during the entire trial there was the correctness of Salvini’s actions and the utmost attention to the health of migrants».
In the political field the reaction of the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is to stand alongside her deputy: «Turning the duty to protect Italian borders from illegal immigration into a crime is a very serious precedent, my total solidarity with Minister Salvini».
There Secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein he found “the intervention of the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni” on the request for Matteo Salvini’s conviction for the Open Arms affair to be “highly inappropriate”. “We believe that the executive and judicial powers are separate and autonomous. It is a principle called separation of powers. Therefore – Schlein argued – institutional respect would require not commenting on open trials. It is surprising that while today he found the time to comment on the Salvini trial, since yesterday he has not yet uttered a word on Giovanni Toti’s plea bargain.».
