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Prosecutors are pushing for Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini to spend six years in prison for barring a humanitarian boat carrying nearly 150 migrants from docking in Italy for nearly three weeks.
The 2019 stand-off between Salvini — then interior minister — and the Spanish charity Open Arms finally ended after 19 days, when an Italian court ordered Rome to allow the passengers, who had been rescued from the Mediterranean, to disembark from the ship on the island of Lampedusa.
But the plight of those trapped on board, at least 15 of whom threw themselves overboard in a desperate bid to reach shore, drew international attention, including from Hollywood celebrities such as Richard Gere and Spanish actors Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem.
Prosecutors in Palermo have charged Salvini with kidnapping and refusal to perform official duties over his resistance to signing papers that would have allowed the ship to dock and passengers to disembark, even as conditions on board deteriorated amid turbulent weather.
The case is one of several instances in which Italian courts have pushed back against tough tactics by governments aimed at deterring irregular migration.
A conviction, which in Italy is only considered final at the end of a lengthy, three-level judicial process, could also bar the far-right leader from holding government office. However, Salvini, whose League is a junior coalition partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government, remained unrepentant.
“No government and no minister in history has ever been put on trial for defending the borders of their own country,” the deputy premier said in a social media video released late on Saturday after the day’s court proceedings, in which the prosecutors requested the six-year sentence, had concluded.
“The Italian constitution calls the defence of the fatherland a sacred duty of citizens,” he said. “I declare myself guilty of defending Italy and Italians.”
Meloni — herself an ultraconservative figure for whom cracking down on irregular migration is a top policy priority — has expressed solidarity with Salvini, an ideological ally but personal rival whom she eclipsed several years ago to emerge as the undisputed leader of the Italian right.
“It is incredible that a minister of the Italian republic could face six years in prison for doing his job defending the nation’s borders,” she wrote on social media platform X.
Salvini’s trial has also drawn the scorn of billionaire entrepreneur and X owner Elon Musk, who wrote on X: “That mad prosecutor should be the one to go to jail for six years.”
The Open Arms stand-off was part of Salvini’s tough approach to irregular immigration and the humanitarian groups that operate Mediterranean search and rescue ships in a bid to prevent, or reduce, the deaths by drowning of people trying to reach Europe by sea.
Salvini, who argues that such charities encourage more migrants to undertake the precarious crossing, spearheaded a stringent law that fined ships entering Italian waters without permission up to €1mn. The law was later scrapped by a subsequent government.
Italy’s campaign against humanitarian rescue vessels has resumed under Meloni, albeit with different tactics after her government’s first bid to turn back a rescue vessel sparked a diplomatic row with France and strong criticism from Brussels.
Instead, Meloni’s coalition has issued restrictive operational protocols which limit the number of people that search-and-rescue ships can pick up. Rome also directs boats carrying rescued migrants to distant ports, lengthening their journeys and reducing their time on patrol in regions where migrants are most at risk.
Humanitarian search and rescue vessels have been impounded on 23 occasions — for weeks or up to two months at a time — as punishment for violating the operating restrictions, which also bar rescue vessels from picking up survivors from more than one wreck at a time.
Since Meloni took power, several large-scale migrant drownings have taken place in Italian waters, including last year’s devastating Cutro shipwreck in which at least 90 people from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan perished when the ship broke apart metres from shore.
This summer about 60 people, including 26 children, mainly from Afghanistan are believed to have drowned when another overloaded migrant ship sank in waters south-east of Italy.