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, it prevented the disembarkation of a ship with 147 migrants on board, anchored off the island of Lampedusa.
“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.”
Salvini, who did not attend the hearing, said he had only done his duty, defending his country, and that he would do it again. “I hope common sense prevails, because defending borders is not a crime,” he repeated today in an interview with the conservative daily. I free. He added that it was an electoral promise that he had to keep: “They asked me to stop the landings.” Salvini is in a moment of decline in his leadership and is using the process 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 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 mobilizations 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.
The episode of the Open Arms It was a highly publicised event in its day – actor Richard Gere came to support the crew – and it symbolised the far-right offensive against illegal immigration and highlighted the EU’s shortcomings in tackling the problem. Salvini, within his drastic policy upon coming to power of closing ports to NGOs that rescued migrants in the Mediterranean, maintained the most intense of the many engagements he undertook with these organisations. In the end, 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 and ordered them to go ashore.
Salvini was then charged with kidnapping and abuse of power, and a trial began that has lasted three years and is now coming to an end. The last hearing of the trial, the time for the final speech by the defence, will be on 18 October, and then the sentence will be handed down. In any case, in Italy sentences are not final until the last instance, the process can last years and there are frequent reversals in sentences, which usually prevents political responsibility from being assumed until they are final. However, a request for prison for the vice president of the Government is a hard blow for the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and for one of her top priorities, the fight against illegal immigration, in which she is following the same hardline line that Salvini began in 2018.
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.
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Defending the borders is the argument that Salvini uses. But above all, the core of his defence and the key to the conflict is that he claims that it was a collective decision of 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.
Beyond Salvini, the process puts in the dock a whole aggressive way of dealing with the immigration policy of the extreme right and of confrontation with the rescue NGOs, and which is still in force today with the Executive of Giorgia Meloni. Although the Prime Minister has learned from crises such as that of the Open Arms that head-on collisions are counterproductive and have preferred less conspicuous but much more effective legal measures.
“You can’t make politics in the skin of someone who suffers”
In his defense, Salvini has 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 one on the immigration front of that Italian Executive, which fell just in those weeks, in the summer of 2019. Then another Executive was formed with the entry of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), and then another of national unity followed with Mario Draghi. The triumph of the far-right coalition of Giorgia Meloni in October 2022 returned Salvini to power, as vice president and minister of Infrastructure. Since then, the heavy hand with immigration, another priority of Meloni, has returned, but it has been more astute and 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 they 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 to save shipwrecked people or Italian law should govern. 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%.
