The judges have requested that Matteo Salvini be sentenced to six years in prison for the events related to the Open Arms ship. This is the request made at the end of the indictment made today in the safe room of the Pagliarelli prison in Palermo. The leader of the union and current Minister of Infrastructure is accused of kidnapping and refusing official action for delaying the disembarkation of 147 migrants on the ship of the NGO Open Arms in August 2019, when he was Minister of the Interior. In response, the deputy prime minister entrusted his defense to social media: “No government and no minister in history has been accused and prosecuted for protecting the borders of his own country. Article 52 of the Italian constitution states: The homeland is a sacred duty of the citizen. I declare myself guilty for defending Italy and the Italians, I declare myself guilty for keeping my word.”
6 years in prison for obstructing the landings and defending Italy and Italians? Stupidity.
Defending Italy is not a crime and I will not give up, not now and not ever. pic.twitter.com/auWMYHBqsM— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) September 14, 2024
“The Minister acted on his own initiative”
But the fate of the Northern League leader was decided in the bunker of Pagliarelli prison in Palermo, where Salvini was not present. In the indictment, the prosecution tried to allege that Salvini had committed the “abduction” by acting “in violation of international conventions and internal rules on rescue at sea and the protection of human rights”, as well as “abusing the powers entrusted to him as a national public security authority”.
One of the key points of the case, perhaps the most important, emerged in the indictment of the prosecutor Gery Ferrara: “When Salvini is Minister of the Interior, the decisions regarding the management of the landings and the granting of POS (landing) permits are transferred from the Civil Liberties and Immigration Department (in a safe place) to the cabinet of the minister, and it is the minister who decides in particular”. Prosecutor Ferrara stated that the ongoing case “is not a political case”.
According to the prosecution, Salvini did not commit a political act by refusing permission to disembark the survivors; instead, he made a personal choice that went beyond the line of the Conte 1 administration’s government linked to the redistribution of migrants in Europe. A sentence that even then-Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte rejected.
“Salvini had an obligation to indicate a safe place for migrants to disembark”
In the courtroom, Palermo Deputy Prosecutor Marzia Sabella stated in her indictment that the risk of terrorists being among the survivors of the Open Arms was unfounded. This was because, Sabella explained, “nobody had gone to the ship to check if they had documents and, secondly, it was discriminatory because the risk of terrorists being present was only due to the nationality of the migrants. The elements of the terrorist risk were not raised by the elements of the terrorist risk.” The police to the ministry.
Palermo Deputy Prosecutor Marzia Sabella said that Salvini, as head of the Ministry of the Interior, “has the obligation to indicate a safe place for the disembarkation of migrants from the Open Arms ship,” underlining the “terrible” psychophysical conditions of the migrants on board the Spanish NGO’s ship.
At the end of the indictment of the Open Arms trial, which lasted about 7 hours, the Deputy Prosecutor of Palermo requested a 6-year prison sentence for the minister Matteo Salvini, accused of kidnapping and refusing official documents. Reminding the 147 immigrants who were victims in the hearing, Sabella explained, “We will seek the conviction of the defendant,” “but at the same time we will defend the limits of the law…”
He said that Matteo Salvini’s “voluntary and conscious refusal” to give port to migrants in Open Arms “has violated the personal freedom of 147 people without any significant reason”. “In this process, the presence of the majority of offended people was missing, because even to be offended you have to be born on the right side. Most of them cannot be traced and that does not mean they are guilty, but it means being homeless and impossible”.
“The prosecutor objects to the government’s political line”
At the end of the first part of the indictment, the lawyer Giulia Bongiorno, senator of the League and also a minister in the Conte 1 government, said outside the courtroom that she was listening to an indictment “not against Salvini, but against the line of the government”.
Bongiorno told reporters: “The prosecutor is preparing an indictment against the security decree bis, which is an action of the government, and against the political line of redistribution and then landing. In fact, he expressed a decision to challenge this very line that is carried out by the entire government”. According to the lawyer defending the deputy prime minister, this is “a somewhat contradictory indictment because the claim is: we are not judging the government, but the security decree bis is against the Constitution, it is unacceptable to redistribute and then redistribute. The landing and the technical table that overturns the basic principles. He talks about the government’s line, the laws, and opposes them – he concludes: there is no Salvini position in the dock, there is a political line in the dock.”
Giorgia Meloni’s defense and Elly Schlein’s attack
The current deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, also defended Salvini, saying: “Salvini did his job as a minister. I believe that there is always a judge who recognizes the correctness of a minister’s behavior and whose duty it is to fulfill, but also defends legality, and I believe that Salvini did that.” Solidarity from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni: “The criminalization of the task of protecting Italy’s borders from illegal immigration is a very serious precedent.”
Following Prime Minister Meloni’s intervention on social media to defend Deputy Prime Minister Salvini, the Secretary of the Democratic Party attacked Elly Schlein, in a “very inappropriate” intervention that invoked the principle of the separation of executive and judicial powers.
Thus, a new period is being experienced in the history of the tension between this government and the cassocks, which reached its peak about a year ago when Palazzo Chigi sources expressed the suspicion that “a section of the judiciary” was playing “an active opposition role”. Everything is happening in an environment already poisoned by fears of conspiracies that have been repeatedly raised in recent months by representatives of the majority, and the opening of migrant centers in Albania is expected by the end of the month.
Source: Today IT
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
