In the bunker room of the Pagliarelli prison in Palermo where the Open Arms trial against Matteo Salvini is being held, Giulia Bongiorno, who intervenes as a defense lawyer, does nothing to throw her into politics: he leaves it all in the square, outsidewhere his party colleagues staged a demonstration with “Salvini guilty of defending Italy” t-shirts.
The echo of the demonstration outside, of the ramshackle support of Pontida, of the shouting at the political process that has taken place in recent months, reaches the courtroom only because the prosecutor Giorgia Righi arrives there for the first time accompanied by an escort.one of the three magistrates supporting the accusation, placed under protection following the threats received in the tense climate that the moving of the trial to the streets and on social media has created.
The lawyer Bongiorno keeps a technical profile excluding the iconic verb “loitering” referring to the Open Arms ship, which according to his reconstruction was not damaged (“The hole was actually a stain”) and that he would have had a safe port indicated in a few hours towards Spain, where he would not have wanted to go and remain “loitering” by choice, this one being political, but referring to Open Arms, not to the trial.
For most of the speech, at least until the most vehement final lines, she chooses a cold and at times boring style of rules and data, expert enough to know that shouting at the political process is a method that works well in the streets and in the media , but which takes very little root in the courtrooms.
There are three key points of his reasoning. First: demonstrate that the long disembarkation times between the request, the response and the operations were not exclusive to the Open Arms, but were the rule both at the time of the Conte 1 Government of which Salvini was part, and at the time of Conte 2 Government, of which Salvini was no longer part, both at the time of the Draghi and Meloni Governments “so as not to appear biased”, and reels off: ships, dates and days of support. Second: prove that the interpretation of the Salvini-Conte differences – within the Government at the time of the Open Arms case – supported by the Public Prosecutor, who believes that Salvini acted alone in disagreement with the other members of the Government, is instead an incorrect interpretation. According to Giulia Bongiorno’s speech, the sequence “first redistribution and then disembarkation” was a consolidated practice common to the two Conte governments, all in agreement, and that the political divergence would have been apparent.
He claims that the letters, which according to the prosecution demonstrate the availability of countries ready for redistribution long before the landing, from the defense point of view instead indicate only the beginning of a negotiation that ended much later. Aims to dismantle the accusation of kidnapping, asserting that the Open Arms ship, on which the migrants were awaiting disembarkation, would not have represented the site of a kidnapping, having, on the contrary, in his opinion – and it all depends on the interpretation of the rules on rescue at sea and on the definition of safe port (Pos) – all the security features to represent a “temporary safe port” while waiting for disembarkationfrom which they could have disembarked, simply representing an inconvenience, given that according to his reconstruction some had been allowed to disembark without particular checks, not even on their minor age.
The interpretation of the action of the migrants who threw themselves into the sea is also opposite: 200 meters from the coast, the presence of life jackets and patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza, Bongiorno claims, would make one think more of an attempt to reach the shore by swimming than to acts of self-harm.
The conclusion, as expected, is diametrically opposite to that of the Prosecutor’s Office which had asked for 6 years for kidnapping and refusal of official acts: the lawyer Bongiorno asks for acquittal «because the fact (the fact of a contested crime, ed.) does not exist”.
His task as a defense lawyer, barring replies from the prosecutor and the defence, for the first instance ends here. He can return to his eminently political role as President of the Justice Commission. A place where there are several justice reforms on the table that it is helping to write. It is not the first time in the history of the Republic that those who write reforms in Parliament simultaneously act as defense lawyers for members of the Government dealing with that same Justice as suspects and accused. A double role, which, perhaps, could entail some conflict of interest – it certainly did in the past at the time of Berlusconi’s ad personam laws – but which in Italy, where the tension between politics and justice has never subsided, does not seem surprisingly cause particular concern.